Critics reviews

Osborne never loses sight of the story's sense of allegory, its dreamlike nature; he just scales it up for today and peoples it with new variations on the sad characters of the Prince's old universe. Not everyone will be onboard with this choice — not when it comes to such a classic wisp of a tale like The Little Prince. But there's a lot of charm, thought and feeling in this film version. It expands on the original without dishonoring it.

Whatever its faults, The Little Prince offers a refreshing reprieve from brainwashing with its anecdotal, leisurely dramatization of a little girl as she discovers that the ambitious corporatized life awaiting her as an adult is a rigged and depressing game designed to stifle individuality for the sake of profiting a select few.

Mr. Prince's spinelessness makes him a nice foil for the little girl, a plucky heroine of unfaltering grit and determination, but causes one to lose sympathy for his earlier exploits as the little prince. While the scenes with the little prince and the aviator are whimsically charming, they fail to make up for the framing plot's trivialization of the source material, undermining the original story's beguiling, tragic quality.

It turns out to be a respectful, lovingly reimagined take on Antoine de Saint-Exupery's classic 1943 tale, which adds all manner of narrative bells and whistles to the author's slender, lyrical story of friendship between a pilot and a mysterious extraterrestrial voyager, but stays true to its timeless depiction of childhood wonderment at odds with grown-up disillusionment.