In The Little Prince by Mark Osborne, a little girl uses her imagination in wonderful and creative ways to prolong her youthful innocence. Although in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry a little boy is filled with curiosity and creativity, he is the only person able to see the story behind a picture. Exupéry’s The Little Prince represents the differences between an adult’s mind and a child’s mind, while Osborne’s take on The Little Prince represents how childhood imagination protects innocents.
In Osborne’s take on The Little Prince the little girl was given the idea that everyone lives in their own little world so she used that as a mechanism to cope with the loss of the aviator;
Closer to an hour and six minutes into the film the little girl looks at a picture of her and the aviator experiencing grief, her mind begins to shut down and pretend that she was going to find the little prince hoping that he would be able to make the aviator feel better and return home.
The little girl going into her own mind is her way of escaping the reality of losing the aviator and preserves her innocence because in her mind he was just unhappy and only The Little Prince would be able to help.
In Exupéry’s The Little Prince being old and young is not a stage of life but a state of mind;
“I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them. But they answered: ‘Frighten? Why should anyone be frightened by a hat?’”
When he showed the exact same drawing to The Little Prince he had reacted very differently;
“‘No, no, no! I do not want an elephant inside a boa constrictor… Where I live, everything is very small. What I need is a sheep. Draw me a sheep.’”
The grown-ups look at it with a bland vanilla view and only see a hat, unlike The Little Prince who saw the story behind the aviator’s drawing.
In comparison, the children of both stories are creative and bright, full of innocence and love. On the contrary, the adults are grey, bland and unimaginative sucking the life out of the children. In the book, the setting is in the imagination of the aviator and The Little Prince. Counterpoint, the movie set is centered in reality around a little girl finding her imagination.
Exupéry’s The Little Prince represents two different mindsets in two different ages of people, while Osborne’s take on The Little Prince represents how imagination protects a child. Imagination in a child is a wonderful thing yet it disappears with time… Never take for granted a child’s value of virtue.
Time Will Tell 