Trailer Trifecta: The Little Prince, Pixar’s Inside Out, WTC in 3D

Question, fans of the book The Little Prince: who is that in the picture above?

Oh, you don’t know? Of course not. Based on this trailer, she’s an added character to whom the story of the book is told – by a seemingly old and crazy version of the narrator, who has been reimagined as a possibly senile wacky neighbor.

I’m sorry – were we so drowning in accurate adaptations of the much-loved, fine-as-is allegorical picture book that we needed a radically new reimagining?

[Scroll down a bit if you want to skip this rant and go straight to the other trailers]

I’ve seen the previous live-action film, and it takes some liberties – first, by being a musical; and second, by not having a special-effects budget that allowed for talking animals. But it captured the spirit of the thing.

Wow, that trailer has not aged well. I promise the movie’s better.

I suspect the new version introduced a girl protagonist just to counter any potential cries of sexism that the original book is mostly male characters. And perhaps it’ll work – hell, I was okay with Tonto becoming a crazy old guy telling his tale to a kid in The Lone Ranger movie. But the book is already such obvious allegory, it seems so on the nose to have it be explicitly told as a parable to someone else.

See what you think. If nothing else, this gives me another opportunity to post one of my favorite Psychotica songs. This is a fan video using clips from the 1974 film, and it’s a way better trailer than either of the two above.

Hell, I think that song gets it better than anything I see in evidence in the new one.

Up next we have Pixar’s newest Inside Out trailer, which reveals itself not merely as Herman’s Head Redux, but Herman and Everyone Else’s Head Too. And the voices inside everyone’s heads all seem to come from the ’50s for some reason:

Seems funny in short bursts, but can it sustain? It’ll need a really solid story, which Pixar used to be great at but have fallen off lately. As a non-sequel it has a good chance.

And then there’s The Walk, a 3D Imax movie about the guy who did a tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center, directed by Robert Zemeckis. I get vertigo just looking at the trailer, and for the first time I am actually afraid I will not be able to handle this in large format. Ironically, tall people like myself tend to have fears of heights, because our center of gravity and sense of balance is worse.