The Little Prince and the Pandemic

by Abby on July 5, 2020

Have you watched everything on Netflix yet? I’m getting there. I can barely remember the days I didn’t have time to watch TV. My kids, however, don’t watch TV. They watch YouTube. And neither one of them is into movies, really, except for superhero movies. Which is how I ended up watching “The Little Prince” with my mom on a recent rainy day.

As a French major in college, I read the original book, Le Petit Prince, published by Antoine Saint-Exupery in 1943, in its original language. The beloved children’s book has been translated into 250 languages, btw, and still sells about 2 million copies per year.

It’s an odd little book. Fanciful and melancholy. The Little Prince is sort of an intergalactic orphan, traveling from planet to planet while pondering deep existential matters. “Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”

The 2015 film is an appealing update. It introduces a new character, a modern-day little girl who’s spending her summer “vacation” studying around the clock to gain acceptance into the elite Werth Academy while her Type-A, pant-suited single mom is at work all day.

It’s impossible for me to not see everything through a pandemic-filtered lens these days. Watching this clip where the mom explains her Life Plan for the little girl, I felt an unpleasant jolt of recognition: minus the Zoom meetings, this was what distance learning was like in our house. The girl works away, hour after hour, day after day, alone in her room, with no friends, recess, or music to break up the schoolwork.

Then, she meets her neighbor, an eccentric old pilot who lives in a ramshackle house filled with his artwork and inventions, as cluttered and colorful as her house is spare and angular. (Even the shrubs are square.) He, as it turns out, is the creator of The Little Prince.

The animation is amazing. The modern-day sequences are CG-animated in the style of “Kung Fu Panda,” also directed by Mark Osborne. The book excerpts are filmed in stop-motion, featuring beautiful paper cutouts and puppets. Osborne told the NYT the use of delicate paper was “in keeping with one of the major themes of the story, which is that anything beautiful is ephemeral.”

Among the more chilling parts of the movie are the scenes of the adult world: drab, gray cities filled with skyscrapers and drab, gray-faced adults pecking away at computers while posters on the wall urge them to “Be Essential.” That message is also reinforced on the walls of the Werth Academy, where posters read, “What Will You Be When You Grow Up? Essential.”

Here again, my grown-up, COVID-colored worldview crept in. Because we know now what we didn’t know just months ago: that the real essential workers are not those pecking away at computers inside of high-rises, but the bus drivers, delivery people, supermarket clerks, mail carriers, medical providers, and caregivers. (And janitors–no spoilers, but this turns out to be important.)

Also essential, it turns out? Social interaction, play, rest, and numerous other things we may have taken for granted until we didn’t have them anymore. The Little Prince, so young and yet so wise, has already learned this lesson: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

FACT O’ THE DAY: In my research for this post, I learned that Antoine Saint-Exupery was himself an aviator who wrote the book in New York, where he fled after the Germans occupied France in 1940. He returned to fly reconnaissance missions for the Allies, and disappeared the year after his book was published. Years later, parts of his plane were found along with a silver bracelet with his name on it.

READ O’ THE DAY: This NYT article by Deb Perelman calls out the impossible challenge of parents working while schools remain closed. This part made me LOL bitterly in recognition:

Why isn’t anyone talking about this? … Why am I, a food blogger best known for such hits as the All-Butter Really Flaky Pie Dough and The ‘I Want Chocolate Cake’ Cake, sounding the alarm on this? I think it’s because when you’re home schooling all day, and not performing the work you were hired to do until the wee hours of the morning, and do it on repeat for 106 days (not that anyone is counting), you might be a bit too fried to funnel your rage effectively.

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