Review: The Little Prince-Le petit prince (2010)

Directed by: Pierre-Alain Chartier | 80 minutes | animation, family | Original voice cast: Gabriel Bismuth Bienaimé, Franck Capillery, Guillaume Gallienne, Marie Gillain

In the famous universe of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the little prince has his adventures. This film “The Little Prince” is loosely based on the book “The Little Prince”. In the two episodes on the DVD, the little prince tells in the letters to his rose about his exciting adventures. In the story “The Planet of Time,” the little prince ends up on a planet where time is confused. The inhabitants and the water are standing still, the leaves are suspended in the air in the middle of their fall. The cause is the snake, which has persuaded the planet’s clockmaker to take a break. The clockmaker set the time back for a moment, to the days when he was not so terribly old and tired, but he went a bit further. Suddenly he was a big baby and couldn’t go back. The prince rushes to the rescue, along with his henchman, the talking fox, and they are again helped by a resident.

In the other episode, “The Planet of the Firebird,” a people lives under the vengeance of the firebird, which burns all the land. The firebird is angry because the king has stolen the crown from him. The king should not really be a king at all. The only one who knows this secret is the princess, but she has locked up the king. The little prince and his little fox come to the rescue again, although the fox would rather eat a chicken. With his notebook, the little prince blows life into drawn sheep, a “nose rock elephant”, a flying boat, and so on, and there is always a way to save the day.

As fanciful as these expansions of the original story of “The Little Prince” are, the animations in which it is performed are without inspiration. The films both last around forty minutes and look most like a cheap video game. Understandably, there is little time and money left for such a small production, but a cheap animation doesn’t have to be an ugly animation. A much more creative and stimulating universe could probably have been created with a style more towards cartoon. Because if you cannot make something realistic, it is sometimes better to make something beautiful instead.

Some characters turned out better than others. In a single character the viewer comes across a kind of amazement at the fact that an animation can apparently also act very badly, but the fox, for example, is a beautiful grumbling beast with very funny and dry commentary on all events. This makes the movie fun for the little ones, who can enjoy an imaginative story that is funny and also exciting. Unfortunately it just doesn’t look like much.