A comparative study of the story of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the animated film The Little Prince directed by Mark Osborne

The little prince written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a story in praise of common understanding: no one is perfect and to achieve peace and friendship, we must understand each other. It is not strange that this idea came up during the chaos of World War II; as it is still considered a deeply new subject. But The Little Prince, despite its poetic values and high human concepts, in its plot needs some reforms, especially for dramatic adaptation. In this article, the dramatic capacities of this story have been investigated with a comparative study of its film adaptation by Mark Osborne, emphasizing the narrative theory and the opinions of Linda Hutcheon and Deborah Cartmell in the field of adaptation. The result of the research show that the aforementioned anime film tried to present a modern adaptation of the work and by presenting the issues of today's childhood in the face of personal and social life, the story of Saint-Exupéry goes beyond the level of a symbolic story. In this movie, all three levels of Cartmell are noticeable. First, it has been transferred from the novel's narrative medium to the visual medium of the film, and the expressive means of the destination medium have been used to objectify it, which raises the considerations of adapting from the narrative form to the visual form, as considered by Linda Hatcheon. Secondly, this transition was accompanied by "commentary", because in it, a new interpretation of the story was presented according to the audience and the time, and the role of the school institution in capitalist societies in killing children's creativity and turning them into "great people" was criticized. Is. Finally, the director is not content to simply present an adaptation of The Little Prince and leave the comparison to the intertextual process of the narration. Rather, the film, with the parallel narration of the story of The Little Prince and the story of a modern-day little girl, has provided the possibility of "comparison" between them. In this way, the movie adaptation can be evaluated as a success.