The Little Prince: The new film of the boy who fell to earth

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Extract from article: Dr Lisa Sainsbury, director of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Roehampton University, underlines the lightly-worn philosophical enquiry that propels the tale. For Dr Sainsbury, the story “invites the implied child reader to think philosophically and, more remarkable perhaps, rests on the conviction that childhood is a site of philosophical reflection”.

Since adults “never understand anything by themselves”, it is the child’s “propensity to ask ‘many questions’ that allows reflection on the mysteries of human being”. After all, the story asks not so much what we know as how we know, playfully dismantling the barriers to understanding put up by the “grown-ups” – who refuse, for instance, to believe in a Turkish astronomer’s discoveries until he wears Western dress.