The Little Prince is the best book of all time, so I was really excited to see a documentary about it on Netflix. I have a shirt that has a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant on it based on the image of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant in The Little Prince. I have read the story probably a hundred times and seen the movie a few times. Every time I see the book mentioned I am reminded of the significance it has had on my own life, as well as the impact it has had on others and watching this documentary was not an exception.

 

The documentary starts off by explaining that, apart from the Bible, there is no other book that has read by so many people. Before I start ranting about how much I love the book too much, I want to mention that I think the best part of the documentary is how it shows the impact that this story has had on such a wide variety of people. People from all different cultures and backgrounds are affected by the themes shown in The Little Prince. It follows several diverse subjects, from a seven-year-old blind Pakistani-Canadian boy to Rupi Kaur (a really cool poet). I always watch documentaries and forget that I’m watching it for a cinematography class and need to pay attention to the boring things like the composition of the shots and B-roll and the soundtrack and all those other technical things that I never pay attention to. I always end up just reviewing the actual content of the documentary instead. I also just think I sound like an idiot when I try to pretend that I know anything about how cameras and editing works. So I guess I’ll just talk about how the documentary presents the events that take place in the book in order and a variety of opinions on each event. Additionally, following each section of the book that seemed to stem from the author’s personal experience, it explains how it could be connected to Antoine de Saint-Exupery's life. I think that since the book is so well known, it made it very easy to pull content from a variety of different representations of the book.

 

I think I would recommend this book to people who have read The Little Prince but have viewed it as an insignificant children’s book. Obviously, if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, you’ll have a much more difficult time understanding the purpose of the documentary. However, on the other hand, if you’re someone like me, who’s analyzed and read the book a thousand times, there isn’t a lot that’s mentioned in the documentary that I haven’t already thought about before. Not that I’m complaining. The Little Prince is one of those things I could listen to (name of excruciatingly boring teachers name that I am censoring for their privacy I guess but actually my desire to not get in trouble) talk about for six hours and I’d still probably find it entertaining I think that the information about the author was probably the most informative part of the documentary for me. Also, there were subtitles and that’s something I am not a big fan of because I have a short attention span and I don’t know how to read. Also, the book was translated from French, so there were a lot of French people talking, and French is just such a beautiful language to listen to and not comprehend.