Faculty Research Grant 2022-2023

Sonia Badenas (International Languages & Global Studies)

The “essential” in Mark Osborne’s The Little Prince. A Buberian reading.

The influence of movies in today’s culture, and particularly on young people, cannot be denied. And when a movie can serve to get the interest of our students on the best literature of the world, this can be extremely valuable for the teachers of foreign languages. Even more if both the movie and the book invite the young people to reflect on the great questions of life, such as “what is essential in this life?” What if the essential was invisible to the eye just because you were not looking in the right direction? What if the only thing you needed was a telescope? What if the essential was not the immediately useful? What if leisure and meaningful relationships were essential for human fulfillment? Mark Osborne’s animated version of “The Little Prince” offers a fresh look on Saint-Exupéry’s bestseller. Far from being a spoiler to the content of the book, Osborne’s movie articulates and develops different perspectives on the crucial issues of friendship, adulthood, and work, taking the famous book as his privileged starting point. The article I am planning to write will specifically focus on what is essential as it is perceived from the different characters’ point of view. We will analyze the movie’s screen shots paying special attention to the scenarios, backgrounds, figures, objects, colors, music, and representation techniques chosen by Osborn to captivate and express each character’s vision. We will take note of the political context of war in which the book was written and its implications to the notion of relationships, existentialism and humanism according to Martin Buber’s philosophy.