Reviews

Movie Review: Le Petit Prince

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25 October 2016

By Bronwen

Everyone gets a bit nervous when they find out that one of their favourite books is going to be made into a film or a TV show. You always wonder whether they’ll get the characters right, use appropriate effects and, most importantly, stick to the story line. Well we were no exception on discovering that the French classic Le Petit Prince was to be made into an animated film for Netflix. Written in 1943 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the novel is a fictional tale with a real life message. Naturally, such books are difficult to turn into movies without diverting from the story line a little but Le Petit Prince (called The Little Prince in the film version) seemed to differ a little too much.

In the book, the narrator uses the present tense to illustrate his meetings with the mysterious “Little Prince” from another planet. It tells the tale of the Little Prince travelling to other planets and meeting various strange people and animals before finally ending up on the planet Earth.

In the film adaptation, we are immediately introduced to two new characters; a young girl and her mother who are trying to get a place in a very prestigious secondary school. The girl clearly is under a lot of pressure from her mother, who expects her to get up early every morning and stick to a rigid schedule of studying, exercising and other activities all with the purpose of getting her into this school.

People who love the book probably would not appreciate this unnecessary fast forward of time to the 21st century and likewise, the story becomes about this girl and her school instead of the Little Prince.

What really would trouble some people would be the fact that the girl goes in pursuit of the Little Prince at the end, only to find that he is the miserable and hopeless caretaker of a building and he hasn’t even followed his own moral message from the book.

Perhaps if you were not familiar with the book, the movie could have been enjoyed but for those of us who love Saint-Exupéry’s timeless masterpiece, the movie did not do it justice.

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