The Little Prince (Mark Osborne, 2015): France

Reviewed by Patrik Hans Joensson, Santa Barbara, 2016. Arlington Theater.

The Little Prince was not only the best movie at the Santa Barbara Film Festival but also one of the best animated movies I have ever seen. With a bunch of different ways to see the film and a beautiful story, it was a good choice from Roger Durling and his crew to have this movie as the opening night film at this festival. The most interesting part about the movie for me, was how clearly different me and my friends saw this film. In my mind, this movie was all about life and death. I interpreted the old and funny neighbor as an alone father who had lost his son and wife, meanwhile my friends saw the film as how the society and our education makes our imagination disappear.

The film is about a young girl who lives with her very strict mother. She has everything scheduled and lives as an adult. One day, the young girl and her mother moves to another house closer to the school and gets an unordinary neighbor. This neighbor show the young girl a whole new world of imagination and playfulness.

The one part that I focused the most on while watching this film is the meaning of the rose. I could not figure out what the rose was suppose to symbolize until I went to the seminar with the director of the film, Mark Osborne. He told us that the rose symbolize all women in our lives. For me that was hauntingly beautiful because of the relationship between the little prince and the rose. One thing that made this movie even more spectacular was how it was both in animation and simply drawings to separate the stories from each other.

To make this film even more amazing, Mark Osborne had the opportunity to work with the great music producer, Hans Zimmer to optimize this movie to it’s real brilliance.

I have been thinking about a movie that is anything similar to The little prince, but I can’t think of any film in particular. I think this was a whole new level of film and it truly amazed me.


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