Review: Classic tale of ‘The Little Prince’ fails to soar

Numerous attempts have been made to film French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 novella “The Little Prince,” but no one has captured its effortless charm and profundity.

Although Mark Osborne’s new CG/stop-motion feature succeeds in bringing the essence of Saint-Exupéry to life in the lovely stop-motion sequences, there are only a few of these delightful moments in an otherwise muddled movie that feels like three films ineptly grafted together.

Rather than presenting the tale, the screenplay by Irena Brignull and Bob Persichetti uses an uninspired story as a framing device. The Little Girl (Mackenzie Foy) — she’s not even given a name — moves into a square, gray neighborhood so she can attend the prestigious academy her mother (Rachel McAdams) has chosen. To prepare her for the snooty school, the Mother has programmed every minute of the Girl’s life. But the odd house next door belongs to the Aviator from the book (Jeff Bridges), now an effortfully eccentric old man, who lures the Girl away from her studies with the tale of the Little Prince.

The sequences illustrating the original story eclipse the computer-generated imagery. Stop-motion director Anthony Scott and his crew evoke the poetry of Saint-Exupéry’s drawings, which Oscar-winner Hayao Miyazaki praised as “miraculous moments which crystalize in visible form the soul of their author.” Although their time together has been cut to a minimum, James Franco as the Fox and Riley Osborne as the Prince succeed in “creating bonds” with each other — and the viewer, as only the best animation can.

But those moments are all too brief, and the audience is thrust back into the by-the-numbers CG world. After the Mother scolds her for wasting time with her new friend, the Girl rejects the Aviator. He falls ill and is rushed to hospital. At this point, any semblance of a coherent narrative disappears. The Girl flies the Aviator’s ramshackle plane to an oppressive city run by the Businessman (Albert Brooks). The Little Prince (Paul Rudd) has grown up (!) to become a cringing, inept janitor. The Girl frees “Mr. Prince”— and the millions of stars the Businessman has imprisoned to light the offices of human drones.

She and the Prince return to his asteroid, only find the Rose — looking like a knock-off from “Beauty and the Beast” — has died under the glass dome. The Prince declares that his Rose will always be with him, echoing the Aviator’s declaration that the Prince is always with him. This long sequence makes no sense, doesn’t fit into the rest of the film and makes hash of Saint-Exupéry’s fable.

“The Little Prince” is not about love transcending death but about the power of love to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Missing from the movie is the key moment when the Prince, having learned about love from the Fox, returns to the garden and tells the ordinary roses they are beautiful but empty. His Rose is more important than all of them together, because of the time he spent caring for her and listening to her “when she complained and when she flattered herself and even sometimes when she was quiet. Because she is my rose.”

It’s regrettable that so much of “The Little Prince” feels so earthbound when the stop-motion sequences show what an extraordinary and moving work it could have been.

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‘The Little Prince’

MPAA rating: PG for mild thematic elements

Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

Playing: iPic Theater, Westwood; also streaming on Netflix