Little Prince

This project was made as an interpretation of "Little Prince". The story of the Prince was one of my very favourites when I was a child, and the thoughts along with themes it presented grew within me with time. Experiences I lived through since my childhood helped me to look at this story from a very different angle. The story of exploring the world, of learning how to take care of each other and a simple happiness turned into a much deeper concept for me. The concept of the darkest corners of humans' minds; minds that fight against their own creators.

Little Prince is the code name of a doctor, whose real name was never revealed. Little Prince works as a psychiatrist in an alternate future of humanity. People learned to treat psychiatric diseases by coupling a patient’s brain with the brain of their doctor. The doctor then proceeds to travel through their patient’s mind and fight the “inner demons” in their inside world. Each world differs from person to person, it is a direct reflection of one’s character and personality, life experiences and traumatic experiences as well. The doctor “fixes” broken pieces of minds, changing the inside world of his patients manually. Little Prince as a doctor takes the form of a little boy in order to appear less threatening to his patients’ minds. He encounters various creatures and dangers during his work. Doctors risk their lives as they are extremely vulnerable and can die inside their patient mind, because they are always perceived as an “alien threat”. The worst thing that can happen with a doctor is getting essentially trapped inside their patient mind. If a doctor is not skilled and strong enough to fight off a disease’s poisonous creatures, there is a high chance of being trapped and killed. The goal is to find a single red rose – the way back out of a patient’s mind. It would mean the inside world is healing and the doctor did his job by fighting off creatures and fixing the brain. 

The Little Prince is a very experienced doctor. He helped many of his patients and rarely had any troubles when performing his work. However this time it seems like he got trapped inside his last patient’s mind. The inner world seemed very broken and had a labyrinth-like feeling. Little Prince couldn’t find an exit and he couldn’t find any particular psychiatric symptomatic creatures to fight. As the story goes, the doctor gets more and more absorbed in this surreal world of a sick brain. He keeps thinking about the rose, it becomes his only goal and he forgets why and how he got to this world. He only knew that the rose is where his home is and he needs to come back to it. After some time the Little Prince finds a pod. It’s an old electronic vessel with a simple construction. The pod’s serial number is 012e, it seems like it crashed from the sky and is broken now. The Little Prince fixes the pod using materials he found around. Eventually the pod turns on and tells the doctor it’s a support unit assigned to this world in order to fight the poisonous creatures. The Little Prince regains his real consciousness for a second and realizes the pod is another old way of treating psychiatric diseases, and it was launched long ago from the Outer world, but seemingly failed its mission. The Little Prince doesn’t tell this to the Pod and gives him a nickname “Pilot”. The Little Prince tells Pilot the story of his journey and that he needs to find a red rose – his way back. The Little Prince visits 6 different places inside this sick mind and speaks to 6 different creatures that represent various psychiatric symptoms. The Pilot assists him until they find a snake-like creature that promises the Little Prince it can bring him back up using its poison. The snake plays with his mind and shows a whole garden filled with red roses, but not one of them helps the doctor to come back out of the sick mind. The Little Prince is panicking, he is frustrated, there is no way back. Later he meets another creature – a fox-like giant. It tells the Prince the ugly truth. All along it was no patient's mind, but his own. The Little Prince was trapped inside his own depressed brain, attempting to cure his own mental problems like he did with other people. However it did not work and left him trapped like another nightmare of his own. The only way out of his sick mind was to let the snake eat him – that was the only way back to his “rose”. Pilot tried to stop the Little Prince, however he didn’t listen and let the snake creature eat him, after which the whole world starts slowly dissolving and breaking. Suicide allegory much.