The Making of "The Little Prince"

... is recounted by the L.A. Times.

How Mark Osborne got 'The Little Prince' to the big screen, with a computer animated twist

... Osborne, 45, first read “The Little Prince” in the early 1990s, while an art student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., when his girlfriend, who who would later become his wife, gave him a copy as he was contemplating a transfer to the California Institute of the Arts, where he would ultimately graduate with a bachelor’s degree in experimental animation. ...

By 2010, he had directed an Academy Award-nominated short film, “More,” a live-action feature, “Dropping Out,” and worked on the “SpongeBob SquarePants” TV series and movie when he was contacted by producers looking to make a CG-animated feature of “The Little Prince.” Instead, Osborne suggested an ambitious idea to tell the story with a mixture of the two animation styles. ... CG and stop-motion animation. ...

Mark Osborne has spent a long time in the animation business. He's worked in television. He's directed features. He's also crossed over to do the live-action thingie. (And why not? All of it is story-telling on a flat screen).

TLP has received positive reviews and upbeat word-of-mouth, but that didn't prevent Paramount from dropping it shortly before release. It's at $100 million in international markets, but by the time Netflix finishes its domestic release, The Little Princes should be close to edning into the black.

What's brave and edgy about the feature is the mashup of stop-motion and CG. The producers hedged their bet by doing production in Montreal (where Free Money is abundant). Still in all, the budget was major league, and that demonstrates more than a little confidence in the director's vision and the subject matter, no?