The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery ( Animated Book Summary )

Hello everyone and welcome to the Books Mandala YouTube channel where we talk about anything and everything related to books. Today we're going to tell you about a famous story that everyone over the world reads. It's the famous novella The Little Prince. The Little Prince written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is a short novella about the paradoxes of adulthood and the loneliness of growing up. It's a story about an aviator, which is an old word for pilot, who finds himself in the desert with an unusual boy. Both of them have fallen from the sky. It's a story about the naivety and pureness of youth teaching an adult to find joy in the stars. It's a story about love and friendship, the matters of your heart, of things that you can only feel instead of know. Now, once upon a time there was an aviator who was lonely among men. He was lonely because grown-ups like him were only concerned with things that didn't matter to him at all, like the size of your houses or mathematics. But he was an imaginative soul and his heart wanted to paint and draw things that could only be seen and understood with deepness. And grown-ups never really have the time to look at useless things like those, right? One time when he was very young, he had drawn a boa constrictor, which is a snake from the Amazon forest, with an elephant in its belly to demonstrate ferocity and danger. Everyone he showed it to, all the adults he showed it to, saw a hat instead and they told him to learn more useful things like arithmetic, linguistics and science. And he followed this advice into that loneliness among men. One day while he was flying over the Sahara desert, he crashed and woke up to find a little boy asking him to draw a sheep. The event was simply so weird that he had no choice but to obey. Alas, there was only one thing he knew how to draw. The boy rejected his drawing of an elephant inside a snake and demanded a sheep instead. Though surprised that the boy saw the drawing for what it really was, the aviator drew a sheep for him to the best of his abilities. But again, the boy rejected it, claiming it was too sick. And this went on and on, with the sheep being too old or the sheep being a ram instead. Finally, after the fourth rejection, the frustrated aviator drew a box with holes in it and told the boy, the sheep was inside. And this, the boy accepted. And that is how the narrator of the little prince actually came to meet the little prince. The little prince was mysterious and elusive and also a little sad for some reason. But over time, the aviator came to know his story bit by bit. The little prince had come from an asteroid barely bigger than himself with three volcanoes and hidden baobab seeds within its soil. Every day, the little prince would beautifully clean his volcanoes and dig up any sprouting baobab seeds because his small asteroid was always in danger of being overrun by humongous, terrifying baobab trees. One day, a new seed appeared on his planet and the prince waited and waited for it until it bloomed into a beautiful rose unlike anything he had ever seen. The rose, for all her precious beauty, was very vain and soon became very nagging and demandering, pestering the prince constantly about the cold and imaginary winds, at the same time bragging about her four thorns and her beauty. And the prince had to keep on caring for her, putting up windshields, putting her in a glass cage. Eventually, the prince grew tired of her and decided to leave the asteroid. Only now, too late, did the little prince realize that his rose as annoying as she was, had indeed loved him so very much. She had not showed it with her words, but she had shared with him her fragrance and her beauty. Too bad, the little prince had been too young to understand and appreciate her grace. And so, after the little prince left, he wandered through space meeting curious figures along the way. On one planet, he met a grandiose king who was lonely for someone to rule over. On another, an alcoholic who drank to forget his shame of being an alcoholic. A businessman who counted all the stars he could see to own them without enjoying them for what they really were. A lamplighter on a planet where the day was one minute long, so he had to light and snuff the lamp every 30 seconds. A geographer who did not believe in recording temporary things like flowers. The little prince traveled all these different planets and met all these weird people and found himself increasingly confused with grown-ups until he came to our little planet, Earth. Unfortunately, the little prince landed in the largest desert in the world. He didn't meet any man at first. He met a snake who spoke in riddles. The snake told him of the loneliness among men, the massiveness of planet Earth, and of the little prince's own innocence. The snake promised to help him one day if the little prince grew too homesick to send him back to the place he came from. Similar to his journey among the stars, the little prince wandered the planet to meet a cast of curious characters. But this time, they were much more mysterious on our little planet. A bland flower in the sand. An echo in the mountains. A railway worker sending travelers back and forth. A merchant selling pills to quench your thirst. And a garden full of roses, just like his own. Encountering this garden full of the rose that he thought was unique to him, the little prince was overcome with sadness and couldn't help but cry and cry. It was then the little prince met the fox for the first time. The fox asked the little prince to tame him, which means to make a connection to someone. To be tamed by someone, he explained, was learning to love them. While he was one fox among a hundred thousand just like him, if he were to be tamed by the little prince, they would learn to need each other. Among all the hundred thousand men and all the hundred thousand foxes in the world, they alone would know each other. And so, the little prince decided to tame the fox. Slowly, gradually, day by day, because taming someone takes time and ritual, the fox and the fox, previously so bored by the stupidity of chickens and the regular routine of hunters, slowly began to find joy in the smallest things. The little prince's footsteps as he walked towards him and the color of wheat, which reminded him of the little prince's beautiful gold hair. When it was time for the little prince to leave, and the fox was about to cry because of this, he came to realize something very, very important. The little prince had been tamed by his rose, who he had left on his planet. He had spent countless time, much like he had with the fox, watering her, preening her, sheltering her, protecting her, loving her. It was exactly this time he spent with his rose that made her so important to him. And because he had tamed her, he would always be responsible for her. People become responsible forever for what they tame. And that is how the little prince came to leave the fox. It was on the eighth day of the little prince and the aviators meeting that he finished telling him his story. Coincidentally, their water supplier ran out, and the prince and the aviator took to the desert to look for a well. Along the way, the little prince commented that the desert was so beautiful because of the precious water hidden in its depths. When they found the well, the little prince decided to give the aviator a gift because the aviator's plane was nearly fixed by that point, and he was leaving and he must say goodbye properly. The little prince told the aviator that he too was going home, and that from then on he would know that he was in the stars, and when he left, all the stars would laugh just for the aviator. In the end, on their last night together, the little prince left the aviator and looked for the snake he had met so long ago. The snake bit him and sent him back home. The aviator was sad, of course, but he never stopped drawing again, and he wrote his book and shared it with the world. At the core of the little prince is a simple truth that a lot of us have forgotten, and only a few of us ever learn again, that the true value of things can only be felt with your heart rather than seen with your eye. Like the fox says in the book, what is essential is invisible to the eye. All these grown-ups in this book, and all of us, tend to get too focused on quantities, appearances, social status, logic, but underneath it all, aren't we all striving for something else? Isn't it more important to be with those we love? Isn't it more important to do things that bring you joy rather than follow the status quo? Isn't it more important to know the character and personality of someone than their salary, their looks, or their house? Is creativity and imagination really as unimportant as numbers and facts? In the end, we grown-ups are lacking an important part of ourselves if we choose to ignore our hearts. Thank you guys so much for listening watching our video. If you like that summary, you can buy the book The Little Prince at Books Mandala, and if you like that video, please subscribe to our channel for similar content. You can also follow us on Instagram and join the Discord server. Goodbye, have a nice day, and keep reading.