About a week ago a colleague of mine introduced me to a French children’s story called Le Petit Prince, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
If you haven’t read it, the story is about a boy born on a tiny planet who starts to question the rationale of adults. He hops from planet to planet, meeting different adults with different professions, all experiencing different problems. Eventually he finds his way to earth, where he meets a fox. I am woefully underselling the plot here. If you’re interested and have about 10 minutes, you can read the entire synopsis on Wikipedia.
This meeting with the fox is somewhat of a turning point in the story, and it’s also incredibly relevant to Maree Docia. You see, nearly every written version of Le Petit Prince includes an illustration of shot of the Prince and the fox sat next to each other.
They all look shockingly similar to the album cover for Docia’s We Were Legends, even down to the colour of the kids clothing!
This revelation opened up yet another rabbit hole, that I all to enthusiastically jumped down. And yes I am well aware that I’m playing fast and loose with the word revelation, but you need to understand that I am now more emotionally invested in finding out who Maree Docia is than I was for my final year dissertation at university.
So, what does this album have to do with Le Petit Prince? Well from what I can tell, not an awful lot. I was really hoping that the titles of each track in the album would somehow match up to a section of the book, but I wasn’t able to find any correlation between the two.
I did however stumble across a particular version of the book the stood out. In 2015 there was a movie adaptation released by Netflix with an absolutely stacked cast. Rachel McAdams, Paul Rudd, Ricky Gervais, James Franco, and Jeff Bridges are all in it! And to top it off, the score was written by none other than Hanz Zimmer. Netflix poured nearly $78 million into this movie, so it makes sense that they’d splurge on the musical direction.
If the name Zimmer doesn’t ring a bell, well he’s the musical genius behind movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, Inception, Gladiator, and The Dark Knight Trilogy. His composing is some of the best out there.
I gave the movie a watch, and then listened to the soundtrack to see if there were any ties between Zimmer and Docia. The soundtrack of the movie and Docia’s album have very different feels to them. I’m definitely not using the correct terminology here, but I didn’t study musical theory at college, so I’m gonna let it slide. I was kinda hoping that they’d both sound the same, and that maybe Zimmer was using Docia’s name as an alias or something? But nothing I’ve found leads down that path.
And this is the problem with this story. There’s so many loose ends and ties that could lead to somewhere, but they either end up going nowhere, or not existing in the first place. I’ll be honest, I’m getting a little disheartened with it. It might just be that Maree Docia forever remains a mystery.
There’s on last avenue of hope that I’m going to wander down before I call it a day. Look for part three.
