The Little Prince Trailer is an Animated Delight

To me, you will be unique in all the world.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery‘s “The Little Prince” has endured for over half a century as a model of magical, coming-of-age storytelling. It uses its water color poetry to point out the lack of creativity and dangerous nature of the adult world, linking the two concepts together as if to nudge us toward causality. Like many good works of philosophy disguised as children’s fare, it comes from a man too familiar with war.

What we’re getting with the most recent film adaptation is a combination of the classic story with a modern take on helicopter perfectionism parenting. The tale of the alien little boy’s travels is embedded in a different story where a young girl’s path to excellence in maturity is thrown off course by a wily old man next door. The “real world” is done in computer animation while the original tale is done through stop-motion. All of it looks great.

The official synopsis:

“The story centers on a fearless and curious child prodigy (Mackenzie Foy) who lives with her equally academically talented yet overachieving mother (Rachel McAdams). After moving into a new neighborhood, the girl meets her next door neighbor “The Aviator” (Jeff Bridges), an old yet eccentric and mischievous man. Soon, she discovers the story of The Little Prince, a story of a pilot who crashes in a desert where he meets the titular boy from a distant planet, a story that brings the girl and the Aviator together on an extraordinary adventure.”

The Little Prince is hitting Cannes before seeing a wide release at the end of July in France and sometime in 2015 in the US. It’s directed by Mark Osborne, whose name might not sound immediately familiar. He’s the director behind Kung Fu Panda, but this also won’t be his first experience with stop-motion: he wrote, directed and animated an Oscar-nominated short in 1998 called More.

The blaring rendention of “Salvation” is a bit much here, but the trailer is fantastically effective.

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