Lorenzo Ortiz, a Puerto Rican filmmaker and comic series creator, has produced an animated version in Spanish language of “The Little Prince” by combining animations with recorded audios of the late renowned Puerto Rican reciter David Ortiz Anglero, his father.
Compared with a blockbuster production being currently promoted also titled "The Little Price" and also based on the book by late French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Ortiz's version is very likely much more faithful to the original, Ortiz told Latin Business Daily.
Versions made with the intention of getting a film to be a blockbuster cannot reflect such a book faithfully. “The book is too tender and tragic,” Ortiz said.
The animated film would not have existed if his father had not narrated the book in a 1976 production.
The audio with the narration was very important in his childhood and “always stayed with me” as Ortiz kept listening to it throughout his life, in different media as time evolved.
“One year ago, when he was spending his last months of life, with the intention of helping to bring back enthusiasm to him, I started this work. It brought him much happiness,” Ortiz said. The work continued after his father's death.
The 2D animations he made were inspired by images from a book he received as a child. He has filled the animation movie with images from his imagination but always trying to be faithful to the original book.
The animated film version was produced between June and the end of October of last year. It started out with pencil and paper and color was added with Photoshop. Additional work was done with the use of Illustrator and After Effects, Ortiz said.
The movie was shown for the first time two weeks ago in The Children´s Museum of San Juan. On Thursday, the version was shown to the general public in a theater in Old San Juan with success and will stay there for at least a week, Ortiz said.
For the future, Ortiz plans to take the movie to other parts of the island or even in the United States as his father's voice is well recognized by Puerto Ricans in the island and abroad. Puerto Ricans, like him, grew up listening to his father's voice as it was also used in multiple commercials. His father was also a famous reciter of poetry.
While showing the movie in other Latin countries is a possibility, it may be best suited for broader distribution in mobile applications because the film is divided into 27 chapters that can be viewed separately, Ortiz said.
The hardest part of completing the work was to follow his instinct and not allow uncertainties and doubts to interfere, Ortiz said.
He was able to complete up to “a minute to a minute and a half” of all the 80-minute film during each of the nights he worked on the project, Ortiz said.
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