“Once upon a time, there was a little prince who lived on a planet that was scarcely any bigger than himself…”  This animated, bittersweet story-within-a-story recounts the classic tale of “The Little Prince” inside a wrapper of modernity. A girl with ambitious-parent issues hears an old aviator tell the story of a strange boy he encountered while marooned in the desert many years before. Ultimately, a movie like this is not judged by how funny or clever it is, but on how well it replicates the magic of the beloved classic it is based upon. The core story, that of “The Little Prince,” captures the magic beautifully—executed with stop-motion animation, the images and voices perfectly replicate the mystery, poetry and playfulness of the original work. The wrapper story, that of a girl trapped in the monotony and lifelessness of modern existence, is very good but not as magical. It’s as if the moviemakers built the wrapper material as a bridge between the poetry of a 1943 child’s tale and the frenetic pace of modern family entertainment, making the somewhat esoteric source material more accessible to today’s audiences while still being true to the original story. The wrapper story doesn’t try to compete with the core story; rather, the wrapper pays tribute to “The Little Prince.” An excellent movie worthy of one of the greatest works of children’s literature.

Extras:

• Don’t you just love it when animated movies provide something besides computer animation? Back in the day of the first “Toy Story” and the animated movies that followed, we were amazed at what computer animation could accomplish. Twenty years later, the sameness of these computer-generated works are apparent and we have become weary of it. (Although it’s very fitting that they used computer animation for the girl’s part of the story in “The Little Prince,” reaffirming the dehumanized sameness that the story was trying to get across.) Today we’re amazed at the power of stop-motion or hand-drawn animation; nothing the computer generates can approach the expressiveness of art produced by the human hand. So it’s ironic that techniques more than 100 years old can beat the latest and greatest computer technology. Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, anybody! Please, more human animation!
• Two great actors provided their voices for “The Little Prince”:  Jeff Bridges as the Aviator, and Benicio del Toro as the Snake. Cool.
• The original novel of “The Little Prince” is usually categorized as children’s fiction, but it’s had problems with categorization ever since it was first published. The reality is that’s it’s both children’s and adult literature—it’s a child’s story on one level, and a deep poetic, philosophical and spiritual journey on the other. That dual aspect is one of the things that have made this book so enduring; as the readers age, they get more out of it.