Netflix's The Little Prince: Short of Something Great

I've not posted anything for awhile and I just caught this film and I've not nowhere else to put it, so it goes here:

Before I start, I want to state that this film isn't bad; there's nothing about it technically that is at fault. It is the sublimate execution of the film that is bad and it is only "bad" because the film shows such potential for being something more. It just doesn't get there, sadly.

For those unawares, The Little Prince is a popular French children's book which acts as an allegory for growing up and dealing with life, love, and loss (though no child is really aware of it at the beginning). How the film adapts it and deals with the subject is actually fairly clever and really shines when it adapts the children's book directly in the form of stop-motion animation. It is in these sequences, I think, that they not just perfectly capture the beauty, the imagination, and the gentle, child-like whimsy of the book's illustrations but builds on them for film. The rest of the film, however, is where the problems are.

The film switches between 3D animation and stop-motion and, whether it was intended or not, the 3D animated sequences are just as dull as the exaggerated grown-up world that it portrays. There's nothing particularly wrong with the animation itself but many of these sequences feel very mechanical and formulaic. It hits emotional beats like a metronome; there's no time to actually build the emotional connection that the film tries to capture. Our "Little Girl" exists in this exaggerated, boring "grown up" world and is sad; she then meets the Aviator, so she's happy; the Aviator gets sick, so she gets upset, and so on and so forth. The most I can say about these sequences is that they build up the anticipation to the stop-motion. Not only are they the most visually impressive parts of the film but that's where the emotional heart of the movie lies, too.

These stop-motion sequences first are done with flat, paper cut outs (pictured above) before transitioning into traditional stop-motion puppets but it keeps the paper "look" throughout for the subsequent sequences. I wish I were verbose enough to adequately describe how I amazed I was at these scenes and the texture that they lent. The use of paper and the wide, varied applications they are used for is staggering. The torn edges of ripped paper are used to simulate cloud formations, crinkles are used to simulate fur and hair, cut strips for grass, and creases for layers in rocks. This even extends to the clothes these puppets wear. Whether or not it's fabric still escapes me but it's made to look like paper. 

Impressive as all that work is to create that level of texture, when it finally comes to fate of the Little Prince, these near-expressionless puppets manage to evoke an emotional response, especially in the short amount of screen-time these scenes make up, more powerful than the rest of the film tries to muster in the rest of time.

Now, I've mentioned this a few times now, how dull and by-the-book the majority of the film is, and though passable as it is, the biggest sin that it makes, I feel, is that by the third act of the film, the story tries to merge the two worlds of the 3D animation and the stop-motion together and it ultimately dilutes the impact of the stop-motion sequences. Because the film is so formulaic, the filmmakers felt that there needed to be some external conflict brought in for our main character to simply resolve and make her matter, and in that, they stamp out the impact of the theme of the Little Prince story. Especially what they decide to do with the Little Prince arc after they perfectly wrapped it up.

It is a real pity because, on paper, the general idea of the film would've been a great had it been pulled off. A little girl in a boring square world, living a square boring life, meets an eccentric old man who recounts to her a fantastic tale of a Little Prince as well as his adventures, and after building a solid friendship, the old man dies and the girl is left to grieve. To deal with her loss, she retreats to the world of the Little Prince and learns through that adventure how to reconcile the loss and carry on his memory.

The actual film itself only carries a nugget of that synopsis' potential and that nugget shines a brilliant gold whenever that potential is glimpsed. But to quote a line from the film, as every star hides a rose; the deserts hides a well. Sadly, this film is mostly sand.