The Little Prince
How ‘The Little Prince’ Came to Animated Life
When
the director Mark Osborne was asked to adapt Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s
popular 1943 novella “The Little Prince” into a computer-generated
animation film, he was skeptical about the chances of success.
“I
said no, there’s no way you can make a big CG-animated movie out of
this book,” Mr. Osborne said during an interview. “It’s so delicate and
poetic.”
“The Little Prince”
is the enduring story of a young boy from a distant asteroid who,
through his travels, discovers what is important in life. As Mr.
Osborne, one of the directors of the film “Kung Fu Panda,” thought more
about the book and the impact it made on him, he decided he could tell
the story using three distinct animation styles to bring the book’s
pages to life. And he expanded the narrative to include a little girl
reading the story for the first time.
Here is a closer look at the techniques used to adapt “The Little Prince,” which opened in theaters on Friday and is available on Netflix.
CG Animation
The
film’s story focuses on the Little Girl (Mackenzie Foy) and her
striving mother (Rachel McAdams), who has implemented a rigid life plan
for the girl to become a “wonderful grown-up.” They live in a
cookie-cutter home, with interiors bathed in drab grays and blues.
“CG
is really good at replicating and duplicating out to the horizon, and
we played with that in creating the neighborhood,” Mr. Osborne said.
“Every house is almost the same, and you get this feeling of repetition,
a mathematical, geometric, confining world.”
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then the Little Girl meets her next-door neighbor, the Aviator (Jeff
Bridges), who lives in a house overrun with trees, flowers and warm
bursts of color that help, along with the story of the Little Prince he
relates to the Little Girl, to unlock her imagination.
“The
Aviator’s home was greatly inspired by the work of Miyazaki,” he said,
referring to the Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki. “It’s like a
museum this little girl gets to explore to get a sense of this other
creative universe.”
Paper Cutout Animation
When
the Little Girl picks up the story for the first time and begins to
read, a plane dives into the paper itself and into a cutout world.
“It’s
flat layers of paper, but photographed with dimension,” Mr. Osborne
explained. The image above shows the set, with layers of paper set up
one behind the other, where the plane scene was photographed. Jamie
Caliri, the film’s stop-motion creative director whose animation work
with paper included an ad for United Airlines called “Dragon,” dreamed up this technique.
“I
wanted to feel like the Little Girl was just learning to use her
imagination, starting from a piece of paper,” Mr. Osborne said. “Jamie
came up with this idea of transitioning slowly so that we’re getting
more dimensional using the flat cutouts.” Sand dunes and other set
pieces are all depicted with flat paper until the moment the Little
Prince comes onscreen. The story then moves to full dimensional puppet
stop-motion.
Stop-Motion Animation
The
adventures of the Little Prince are executed using a sparse,
stop-motion technique. Mr. Caliri and his team worked to make the
puppets for the sequence out of paper, something that Mr. Osborne said
he wouldn’t have thought of.
“Every
shot in stop-motion where the character is acting, they would have to
rebuild the costume afterward because it would tear and rip,” Mr.
Osborne said. “But it’s in keeping with one of the major themes of the
story, which is that anything beautiful is ephemeral.”
Mr.
Osborne saw this delicate technique as the ideal way to visualize a
delicate story. He said that when some people first saw this section,
they thought it was CG pretending to be stop-motion.
“But
I don’t think CG could have ever emulated the kind of organic detail
that you get when you are actually building things like this.”
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