![\"141210071132-the-little-prince-movie-still-story-top\"](\"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/141210071132-the-little-prince-movie-still-story-top.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMark Osborne’s The Little Prince<\/em> began its life inside three vintage suitcases. They were designed with sole purpose of capturing the spirit of the beloved eponymous\u00a0book and transporting it around the country to give the director’s vision of the film to prospective producers. What emerged from this was something surprisingly unique.<\/p>\n The film’s narrative conceit is a story within a story with the former being that of the original The Little Prince<\/em>. A young girl with an overachieving \u00a0and controlling mother leads a sorry existence, sapped of creativity or pleasure. The only respite from this comes when a neighbor, an old aviator, begins telling her stories of a\u00a0magical\u00a0character from his past. \u00a0She begins to take control of her own life and she yearns to emulate the hero of the aviator’s stories.<\/p>\n The film combines both stop motion and CG to present the stories of the Little Prince and the newly introduced girl respectively.\u00a0The CG is reminiscent of work on the Incredibles and Frozen but unfortunately when comparing the two animation styles one is unmistakably less arresting. The stop motion, quite apart from the material involved, is simply more visually interesting\u00a0while the CG lacks the attention to detail and natural beauty of the former. That is not\u00a0to say that the CG in this film is not expertly executed. The final sequences of the film (which are shot in CG) where both worlds intersect make for some stunning visuals. These later sequences contain very surrealistic, fantastic, even Kafkaesque imagery that in many ways redeem the dryness\u00a0of the animation style exhibited earlier in the film. When it comes to the Little Prince sequences, they are absolutely\u00a0fantastic. They have a life and verve that is truly magical to behold.<\/p>\n The film itself is originally French and this US premiere had an ensemble dub in English with some rather famous actors. Generally the transition to English was well handled and Jeff Bridges and Rachel McAdams do a fantastic job voicing\u00a0their characters. However in some instances, especially in the case of James Franco, the celebrity casting is more off-putting than anything else, \u00a0leaving one to wonder at the casting decision rather than pay attention to the flow of the story.<\/p>\n The Little Prince is certainly a must see for fans of the Book. It successfully creates a vehicle for the book to be translated to a big screen debut. Those who are not familiar with the source material should first consider their comfort level with status quo CGI before making a decision.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reviewed by Martin Hutchinson. Viewed at the Arlington Theater, Santa Barbara. Mark Osborne’s The Little Prince began its life inside three vintage suitcases. They were designed with sole purpose of capturing the spirit of the beloved eponymous\u00a0book and transporting it around the country to give the director’s vision of the film to prospective producers. What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81295,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,272],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","category-santa-barbara-film-festival-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/81295"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}