U.S. director takes on beloved story
Mark Osborne’s animated version of The Little Prince debuts in Cannes
There are few things more sacred to the French than Le Petit Prince, the 1943 novella written by airman/author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Which may be why director Mark Osborne — an American! — held out so long when the French producers approached him with the idea of an animated feature version.
“I said it’s impossible; it can’t be done,” Osborne said after a screening of The Little Prince at the Cannes Film Festival that proved the opposite to be true. “I didn’t want the book to get hurt in any way.”
He had been given the work years ago by a girlfriend (tellingly, now his wife) when they were in college.
“It was such a big moment in my life and in our relationship,” he said. “I knew the book has a power and I know that the power of the book is that people either share it with someone else or someone shares it with them and it becomes a part of your life. That’s why I said no.”
But he thought about it, and eventually came up with a way to “keep the book safe at the heart of a larger story.” On the screen, The Little Prince features a little girl (voiced by Mackenzie Foy) whose mother (Rachel McAdams) moves them into a new house in order to get her into a prestigious school.
The house is a steal, because the next-door neighbour is a crazy aviator (Jeff Bridges) who relates to his young friend the story of how he once crashed his plane in the Sahara Desert and met the alien figure of the title, voiced by Osborne’s son, Riley. Paul Rudd, James Franco, Paul Giamatti, Al- bert Brooks, Ricky Gervais and others fill out the cast.
Prince purists may take exception to the film’s dramatic licence, but it would have been difficult to pad the story — which runs to less than 100 pages with illustrations in one popular English translation — out to feature-length. Osborne hopes the film will please fans of the book while providing an “initiation” for those who haven’t read it.
The film features two styles of animation: computer-generated for the world of the little girl and the elderly aviator; and stopmotion for the younger aviator’s meeting with the Little Prince. “It’s probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever tried to do,” Osborne said, referring to the workload involved.
Asked how he dared take on such a touchstone of French culture, the director said he was steeped in it. “I lived in Paris for two years when we began the pre-production,” he said. The film has been in the works now for more than eight years. “The hearts and souls of many French artists are in the movie.”
That includes French-Canadian artists. The Montreal office of Mikros Image helped create the stopmotion animation, and production designer Alexander Juhasz spent more than a year there working on the film.
Osborne noted that all the stopmotion work is constructed out of paper. “I wanted it to be connected to the pages of the book,” he said, and to Saint-Exupéry’s simple, evocative sketches that enliven the printed version. “It’s somewhere between reality and those drawings.”
Saint-Exupéry, whose 1935 crash in the Sahara inspired the setting of The Little Prince, died in 1944 when his aircraft was shot down by German fighters over the Mediterranean, only about 140 km west of Cannes. The Little Prince has remained hugely popular since, having been translated into more than 250 languages.
The Little Prince will open in Canada in November.