NATIONAL BALLET BRINGS LE PETIT PRINCE TO LIFE.

The enduring relevance of The Little Prince

Seventy-three years after his novella was first published, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince has become a trending topic. At first glance, there’s nothing extraordinary about this tale: no teenage vampires, televised death matches or kinky sex scenes. Yet over the last little while, it’s been adapted into an animated film that stars Jeff Bridges, Rachel McAdams and James Franco, a graphic novel, several operas and, most recently, the National Ballet of Canada’s first full-length ballet choreographed by a Canadian in 10 years.

The Little Prince is about a stranded aviator who encounters a young prince from a tiny asteroid, where he left behind three volcanoes and a personified rose whom he loves. The aviator and the prince become friends, and the prince shares stories of his travels to Earth, which include encounters with several strange grown-up characters. The text is accompanied by Saint-Exupéry’s simple watercolour illustrations.

“There’s actually not that much of a story, but there are a lot of relationships and beautiful characters in it,” says The National Ballet of Canada’s Guillaume Côté, who choreographed the company’s adaptation of The Little Prince. “The author stretches the audience to look between the lines and interpret their imagination and, for me, dance does the same thing.”

The novel is, in part, a reference to the real-life experiences of Saint-Exupéry, who was a renowned aviator. In 1935, he crashed in the Sahara Desert and became so dehydrated he experienced mirages and auditory hallucinations. The story’s rose is widely considered to represent his wife, with whom he was having marital problems at the time.

“It appeals to both young and old because there are at least two levels to read the book on: the boy’s story and the grown-up’s story. So whoever reads it finds something in it,” says Maria Nikolajeva, director of Cambridge University’s teaching centre for children’s literature and the former president of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. “It’s about topics that have eternal and universal appeal.”

“The themes include the value of friendship, the meaning of love, what loss is, what loneliness is, how important creativity is, that divide between adult and child levels of imagination, and how some adults keep the imagination of childhood and others don’t,” says Judith Saltman, former chair of the master of arts in children’s literature program at the University of British Columbia and current professor at UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies.

Like Peter Pan, Alice In Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh and other lasting children’s tales, the crux of the story is about the anxiety of growing up, and how that affects one’s imagination and freedom. “The thing is, this idea has been explored by child psychologists, and children usually do want to grow up. It’s very unusual that a child doesn’t want to grow up,” says Nikolajeva. “So the idea of a child not wanting to grow up is a grown-up anxiety.”

While baby boomers may have been the first generation concerned about “selling out” in adulthood, the millennial generation seems to have taken their place, at least in emotional terms. According to a study by psychologists at the University of Granada, an increasingly large number of young adults in Western society are presenting emotionally immature behaviours — something they’ve dubbed “Peter Pan Syndrome.”

It’s not difficult to understand the appeal of The Little Prince to those dealing with the emotions around growing up. “There’s a different sort of romanticism to the story — the romanticism adults feel for children,” says Saltman. “Adults think of children as more pure, more innocent, more naturally full of wonder and they think they lose that as they become adults.”

The Little Prince’s resurgence also comes in the midst of a larger trend of reworking fairytales for stage, TV and film. Some recent examples include Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland movies, Maleficent, Snow White and the Huntsman, and popular TV series Once Upon a Time and Grimm. “We’re living in a digital age, and in a very dangerous and corrupt world. Maybe in the 21st century we’re hungry for the imagination again,” says Saltman.

The National Ballet’s Côté was drawn to the story through an existentialist crisis in his mid-20s. “I was reading all the French philosophers and ended up coming back full circle to my childhood to re-read The Little Prince,” he says. “The book has beautiful philosophies on what true happiness is; it’s good to remember that the essentials in life are invisible to the eye and what truly matters is in the heart. Facebook will never make you happy because of the vanity and warped voyeurism behind it.”

Côté hopes the ballet, which explores some of the book’s more adult themes, encourages other grownups to revisit the text that often gets an erroneous rep as juvenile. “Children’s literature is absolutely underestimated,” says Saltman. “One of the great annoyances for children’s authors is when people say their work isn’t as significant or important as other genres.”

“What appears to be simple can be very complex,” says Nikolajeva. “The Little Prince is one of the greatest books ever written — and I don’t mean children’s books — I mean the greatest ever written.”