The peculiar screen journey of 'The Little Prince'
The Little Prince himself says: "What is essential is invisible to the eye."
The phrase from the beloved 1943 French novella is unintentionally appropriate for the acclaimed animated film adaptation.
The Little Prince, featuring the voices of Jeff Bridges and Rachel McAdams, was set for release March 18 when it vanished from Paramount's schedule a week before.
Citing "strange times," director Mark Osborne announced on Twitter that "this special and unique film" would have to be "anticipated just a little bit more" with a new distributor. He humorously urged fans to head to Canada to see it.
Months later, The Little Prince is becoming very visible: It premieres Friday on Netflix and in theaters in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
"All I can say is everything about this movie is unconventional," Osborne says. "That’s its strength. It's been unconventional every step of the way."
The Oscar-nominated co-director of Kung Fu Panda was petrified when he was approached in 2009 to direct the film version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s poetic, otherworldly Le Petit Prince, which has been translated into 250 languages and sold more than 145 million copies.
"My thought was 'I don’t want to be the guy to screw it up,' " Osborne says.
He did nine months of pondering, even studying Orson Welles' screenplay for the adaptation the filmmaker never shot.
Osborne found his way in with a computer-animated story of a modern Mother (McAdams) and a Little Girl (Mackenzie Foy), with the Little Girl imagining the classic story of The Little Prince (voiced by Riley Osborne, the director's 15-year-old actor son) told in stop-motion animation.
"I didn’t want to do what was completely expected, to make the famed drawings move. I wanted to go beyond that," says Osborne. "My sleight-of-hand, clever way was to show the Little Girl’s version of this book."
Osborne gave Bridges a five-hour pitch to sign on as the book's narrator The Aviator, the Little Girl's eccentric neighbor who introduces her to the Little Prince's world.
The director carried what Bridges describes as "this magical suitcase the Little Prince might have traveled the heavens with," featuring artwork and stop-motion puppets.
Osborne says he gave about 400 versions of the suitcase presentation to pull his talent and animation team together. "I needed to convince people I was taking this very, very seriously."
The $80 million project required two years of preproduction in Paris and two years of filming both the stop-motion and computer animation in Montreal.
The Little Prince premiered to rave reviews at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, won a César Award for best animation and went on to earn $100 million worldwide. Paramount, which dropped the film without explanation, declined to comment to Paste BN.
Animation historian Jerry Beck called the drop "a mistake" and "unprecedented," adding that "the studio just doesn’t understand the animation market." He cites Paramount's R-rated Anomalisa, which earned an Oscar nomination but made just $3.8 million at the box office.
Osborne has recovered from the "absolutely unexpected" move, buoyed by Netflix's decision to pick up the project, which has awards potential.
"One of my favorite quotes in the book is, 'Grown-ups are very, very odd,' " Osborne says. "(But) I’m looking ahead now."