/ Liu Ying
"I don't like people reading my books rashly," Antoine Saint-Exupéry wrote worriedly in the opening paragraph of "The Little Prince" . In the world of this romantic pilot novelist, the light shell of fairy tales is wrapped in existential propositions that are almost as heavy as the times, and the disputes over love and selfishness on asteroid B612 are far from being as simple as one person and one rose. Foxes, poisonous snakes, deserts, constellations... these dazzling images are surrounded by each other. They can not only play a warm bedtime stage play for children, but also work together to form a huge philosophical torture to explore the needs of "those who are thrown into this world" How to coexist with the lonely lonely soul, and how to find joy in this bustling world.
The author's vigilance seems like a spell. In the half century since, the fairy tale character born in 1943 has had a thousand faces in various interpretations, but these works too focused on recreating the commercial glory of the original have little satisfaction. Although most of the adaptors are sincere, the myth of "innocence" has ruined the cultural vitality of these works: "The Little Prince" has thousands of interpretations, and its successors have all chosen the most superficial and relaxed path. . From this point of view, although the Mark Osborne version of The Little Prince, which cost 80 million US dollars to build, shows a somewhat different interest, and has also "used the theme" to have an addiction to imagination, but in his bones, it is inevitable to repeat the past. People make mistakes.
The French producers did not push the adaptation of this version much on the road of long-term speculation, but the director's own original spirit was bursting, adding a contemporary shell with a rather American flavor to the story of the little prince: a man who is on the road of learning tyrants. The year-old friendship between the girl and the neighbor pilot grandpa. The film adopts two completely different styles, drawing the audience's distinction between reality and fairy tales. The little girl's passages are synthesized with CG technology, which is no different from the mainstream cartoons that fill the screen today (and in fact, Mark Osborne also admitted that he It is indeed created with Pixar as a benchmark), which is 100% in line with the viewing habits of today's market, and seems to coincide with the main theme that this part of the story wants to express: the boring, even cold, life of an assembly line. The little prince, which is only 16 minutes long, uses paper painting to freeze the frame, returning to the craftsman's simple temperament, which is more in line with the definition of fairy tales in the traditional sense. Reality and fantasy are laid out at the same time in front of a little girl. The two forces compete with each other, and the elements of farce, warmth, and humor are interspersed. All this is natural for Mark Osborn, who is struggling in Hollywood. , but the overly skilled image design also makes the film characters full of facial defects, except for the stereotyped mother who loves her daughter, and the only adult in the film who always keeps her childlike innocence - the pilot, the other characters are mostly vague passers-by. .
"The Little Prince" exists in the film as a metaphorical text, as if the "serpent swallowing an elephant" painted by Saint-Exupéry has become a scale for testing innocence, a prism that refracts innocence, and its function, in addition to Set up the prelude for the big adventure climax at the end, and is also responsible for providing what might be called cheap empathy objects for people in front of the screen. These fairy tale paragraphs with different styles from the main plot are interspersed, no doubt to mobilize the nostalgia of the old times for the adult audience, and then to capture those symbols/golden sentences in the original work that we could not understand, so that melancholy fills our eyes and turns them into moving tears flowed out.
Mark Osborne's version of The Little Prince reduces the absurd predicament of mankind to the indifferent stereotypes of the adult world, the fallacy of which is simply due to the tameness of social success - the little girl lands on a flying adventure in what seems to be forever. On a planet shrouded in darkness. There, people in the office work tirelessly, business magnates are in power, and children are expelled for being considered dangerous goods. In the binary opposition between child and adult, the former, representing innocence, naturally won the final victory, while the little prince who entered adulthood, like the audience, seemed to drink a soul with water added to his bones under the call of memory. Chicken soup, while restoring the thin body of the past, also regained the innocence of the past.
The director tries to express another childhood path through the transformation of the little girl's life, as well as the possibility of "reforming adults" with fairy tales-the mother, who is in full swing throughout the play, shows a soft smile at the end of the film and climbs with her daughter Go to the rooftop. With Hans Zimmer's very sensational music, the ending of looking up at the stars is a tribute to "children", but unfortunately, in the movie version of "The Little Prince", the so-called "children" have already been symbolized The goal of self-purification for adults. In other words, although Mark Osborn's "The Little Prince" is impeccable both technically and narratively, and is a model for a perfect commercial film, his vision determines the connotation, and he still failed to make it to the one written by Saint-Exupéry. Lonely Planet, to touch the real little prince.
The September 2015 issue of Universal Screen
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