Film Name: 小王子 / Le Petit Prince
It’s always puzzled me: if there’s no princess, why must it be a prince? Little Man and Little Prince are quite different. Perhaps the title of prince carries an innate romanticism, or maybe the name Little Prince makes him uniquely special—like the one and only rose that blooms on his planet. We’ll never know.
But this film does find a “little princess” for the Little Prince. Though she’s just an ordinary commoner, her presence adds a sense of reality to the ethereal love between the Little Prince and the rose.
The little girl transforms the Little Prince’s theme from one of searching to one of rescue. In the book, the Little Prince has no redemptive function. He merely wanders, searching for the meaning of life. Though his quest carries a certain inspirational quality for readers, he fails to help the adults in his world return to innocence. In the film, however, the little girl redeems the Little Prince, who has been assimilated by the adult world. This makes us feel that perhaps we too can rediscover our original selves.
In truth, everyone possesses their own planet, though these worlds easily merge with the tracks of money and power—just as on the nameless planet. The stars are imprisoned, and so are people’s hearts. They mechanically perform monotonous tasks, enslaved by their work. When the glass dome shatters, the stars burst free—the film’s most powerful climax and a groundbreaking visual interpretation of “The Little Prince.” Deep down, no one truly wants to be confined; everyone yearns for freedom. As the film states, the real question isn’t whether we grow up, but whether we retain hope.
For most of the film, the Little Prince is rendered in stop-motion animation with a paper-like texture, subtly echoing the classic scenes from the book. However, when encountering the adult version of the Little Prince or the moment he finally returns to his own planet—scenes not depicted in the book—he transforms into a three-dimensional CG character. The film consistently guides us beyond the simple textual world of the Little Prince into reality—a reality where adults and children find each other strange, a reality that appears orderly and formulaic when viewed from above, a reality filled with gloom and ugliness yet still harboring light and hope. It achieves this transition through the interplay of stop-motion and CG techniques.
The Little Prince returns to his planet and sees his withered rose. While the film closes the most heartrending open ending of the book, it also presents us with a new open ending. How will the Little Prince face the life ahead? He used to love watching sunsets so much that he could watch them over forty times a day. Will he come to love watching sunrises instead? In truth, each of us is perpetually rebuilding our own planet. Every rescue is followed by an even longer quest.
Isn’t life precisely this relentless journey between rescue and quest?
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