Learning to fly
The latest animated adaptation of The Little Prince is shaping up to have quite an impressive voice cast. James Franco, Rachel McAdams, Jeff Bridges, Benicio Del Toro and Paul Giamatti are all on board for this big-screen take on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved French novella, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
It’s not yet clear as to which roles the actors will take on, but Bridges — whom I know best from The Newsroom and, yes, Dumb and Dumber — will be the narrator, a pilot who crashes in the Sahara and meets a young prince from an asteroid known as B-612. Marion Cotillard has been offered the part of Le Petit Prince’s mysterious rose, and I truly hope she considers it.
While book-to-film translations of literary classics are nothing new, I have a few apprehensions about this one. Mark Osborne is set to direct it and the fact that he helmed Kung Fu Panda — and worked on a few episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants — isn’t terribly comforting. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Philosophical musings
First published in 1943, The Little Prince has endured for good reason. At face value it may look like a children’s fable. But beneath the Lyon-born author’s straightforward prose and naïve illustrations, completed in New York City the year before, lie deeper philosophical musings.
Since I discovered The Little Prince as a teenager, which is pretty late now that I think about it, I must have read and reread it a dozen times. On each occasion I gleaned something new, a little nugget of wisdom that flooded my head with both wonder and clarity. Saint-Ex, as Americans called him, wrote simply yet evocatively of universal themes such as childhood, self-worth, art, love and death, filtered through the prism of his own short but layered life.
When he disappeared while flying over the Mediterranean in 1944 at the age of 44, Saint-Exupéry had already worn several hats. Aside from being a military pilot, he was an aviation pioneer who helped develop postal routes across the Sahara and the Andes. He was also a journalist and publicist for Air France. As an editor, I’ve adopted one of his sayings as a mantra: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.â€
Latest tribute
Though I only knew of these things about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry fairly recently, they have enhanced my reading experience by a great deal. My copy of The Little Prince, a Spanish-English hardcover I bought while living in Bogotá, is one of the stars of my bookshelf. Oddly enough, I find El Principito to be richer and more nuanced than its English counterpart, perhaps because I’m reminded not only of my youth but of Saint-Exupéry’s as well; the aristocrat was appointed director of Aéroposta Argentina, an airmail company in Buenos Aires, when he was 29.
The 2014 version may be the latest and most star-studded effort to bring The Little Prince to the screen, but there have been others before it. In 1974, Charade director Stanley Donen spearheaded a live-action take that featured Gene Wilder and Bob Fosse. An animated television series adapted from the book ran from 2010 to 2012 on French television.
Other tributes range from limited edition pilot’s timepieces from Swiss watch manufacturer IWC Schaffhausen and keychains from Galeries Lafayette in Paris to a Google doodle marking the writer’s 110th birth anniversary in 2010. Don’t screw up this one, Hollywood.
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