This is probably one of those films I should be mor familiar with since the book was a big deal but for the most part it really got past me. It’s a pretty decent adventure although at times it can be so focused on the slice of life aspect that it almost gets a little dull. The slow moving nature of the story is what keeps it from being just a little bit higher. I would still recommend it though if you’re looking for an abstract film about adventure. Also props to the film for never actually giving us all the names for the characters. Whenever a film does this organically where you don’t even notice, I gotta give a little shoutout.

The film starts with a girl and her mother moving into a new home. The mother has a very detailed plan for her daughter which accounts for every hour or every day for the next few years. The idea is that this way her daughter will be able to achieve her life’s dreams with no delays. Obviously this is done to a rather insane degree but it really shows how much her mother was thinking of her. Coming up with this plan had to have taken an incredibly long time. It’s sort of the old issue of worrying about your kid so much that you go a bit overboard and end up creating more work for them.

Well, her daughter aims to do her best at each task. Unfortunately their crazy next door neighbor launches a rocket which breaks a big hole into the apartment and this kicks off a series of events that lead the main character to stop following the schedule. She is much too interested in the neighbor’s stories about a young prince in space. the more hours that are used up, the more that the plan can no longer work. Should the girl continue going off script and hanging out with the neighbor or should she begin to get back on track?

I was glad that the film didn’t make the mother overly unreasonable. I think this is one of those situations where if the girl had talked to her more, they could have avoided some of the issues here. Instead by working in secret and dodging the schedule it caused things to get more tense than needed. The mom was trying her best and ultimately just lost sight of the big picture here while she was trying to help. It’s one of those issues where I can feel really sympathetic since sometimes you are trying to help a lot and things just don’t go the way you want them to. That’s just how these things go.

She was willing to readjust the plan to account for a friend after all. Having to totally discard the plan is a bit more of a difficult ask though. It’s why you usually want to let your kid find their own goals through exploration but when you’re really successful it can be easy to want to craft a good life for your kid. So yeah there are a whole lot of things to consider here.

As far as the animation goes, the film looks decent. The scenes on the human world look decently good. It may not be high-end, nor are there scenes to really test this out since this is a very realistic film but I would say that it works out pretty well. The dream sequences within the stories tend to be a little too experimental for my taste though. I’d say that’s a good part of why I would just want the film to return to the human world some more. The dynamic between the mother and her daughter was far more interesting to me even if the stories were more supernatural.

The neighbor was also decent but I don’t cut him too much slack here. Apparently, his inventions haven’t been working for a long while now. He should know better than to still be testing his rockets in a place where they could possibly hit someone. Blowing up part of the house was a gag but a situation that felt dangerous all the same. It could have easily gone lethal depending on where the girl was.

A large part of the film is about the story though so lets talk about that for a minute. The Little Prince had some sheep and flower friend, then he went off to journey through the cosmos. He met many people like a King, a wealthy guy, and more. Unfortunately the story had a sad ending where the Prince got poisoned and died so this leads the girl to try and find him in the real world. Now how much of this is figurative vs literal is up to you but of course I always like to take this at face value. It turns out that things have not gone well at all as the prince is now a janitor and has basically given up all hope. All of the figures from his story appear but in different circumstances than the story had suggested.

This leads to a classic story about not giving up hope and finding your way once again. The Prince eventually gets better but sure takes his time in doing so. There’s nothing wrong with the story itself but the plot on Earth just feels a lot more tangible. You can really empathize with what’s going on and the gravity of the situation. For the Prince plot, well it still feels like a story book even once it’s “real”. In a way the story book intro kind of doomed it. I think there would be a chance to get past that in a longer film where you had more scenes for the second act. This one just doesn’t have enough time for it.

You’ve still got a well written film and I certainly wouldn’t say otherwise. That said, it’s not going to have a ton of replay value here. The film is just too soft spoken for that. It’s a quiet kind of film that tackles good concepts that are worth discussing but you only need to do that once. After that there is no big spectacle or action scenes to carry it through. I should note that the film is also quite serious. Not dark by any means but there aren’t a lot of jokes here which is also something that could have helped the replay value.

Overall, The Little Prince is a good movie. I would recommend checking it out at least on an initial watch. It’s not like every film needs to be watched twice after all. It can be a bit slow but doesn’t really have any bad scenes. It’s a safe watch for just about anyone. If they ever make another film like this, I would say to either incorporate both plots so that they live in a world where there is a prince or go all in on one world or the other. There just isn’t enough runtime to really get into both. I would also forget the experimental type animation and go for something with classic hand drawn instead.

Overall 6/10