One advantage of animation is that you can record a whole new language dialogue track, and no one will know the difference. (It’s like the silent era, when switching out title cards meant it didn’t matter whether the film came from Berlin or Bognor.) So we have the new adaptation of the popular Saint-Exupéry children’s tale, simultaneously presented in two different cinemas at Cannes, in French and English, with entirely different voice casts involved. It was the English one for me, with Jeff Bridges and Rachel McAdams, rather than André Dussollier and Florence Foresti; however, with Kung Fu Panda’s Mark Osborne on board as director, the artistic balance is definitively tilted in the direction of the Anglo-American crowdpleaser.
This becomes immediately obvious in the first few minutes. This is not a direct adaptation of The Little Prince – in which an airman crashes his plane in the desert, and then meets a mysterious kid who claims to live on a tiny planet – but, rather, it is inserted into a more conventional one, a Disneyfied empowerment yarn involving a nine-year-old girl whose minutely-monitored life is overturned by a crazily-eccentric elderly next-door neighbour who has, of all things, an ancient biplane in his back garden. Apart from rather obviously taking its cue from Up, the Pixar hit that also involved unconventional methods of air transportation, The Little Prince is a sort of process-movie: each time the next-door airman (for it is he) gives the girl a page from his notebook – complete with Saint-Exupéry’s own drawings – it reinforces some point about letting your childlike imagination run free, be true to yourself, anything essential is invisible to the eye, all that sort of thing.
Osborne’s big stylistic move is to animate the “present” in big-eyed CG – very much in the contemporary manner – and then, when diving into the old man’s increasingly elaborate storytelling, to switch to a very beautiful rustling-paper stop motion technique. It’s a very effective, and very easy on the eye, method of demarcating the two: the former is all muted monochrome, clean lines and razor-sharp focus, while the latter has a highly-coloured sketchiness and crinkle-edged texture that accurately distils the original’s design qualities.
Where difficulties arise, however, is in the sheer proliferation of narratives and motifs. The superstructure is complex enough in itself – with the girl scrapping with her mother and bonding with the old man as he attempts to get his plane off the ground – and binding it to Saint-Exupéry’s own multi-stranded storytelling, with star-collecting businessmen, spirit-guide foxes and desert hikes, is almost too intoxicating a brew. There are at least three false endings as Osborne looks to tie all the layers up in the final 20 minutes, so that when “FIN” drops finally into place, it’s something of a relief. Be that as it may, this is a very good-looking film that represents a brave attempt to do justice to a very popular book; it manages it, just.

Source: www.theguardian.com