Its plot, heavily influenced by the 1939 cinematic version, focuses on a young girl who is relegated to a life of servitude at a New York boarding school after receiving news that her father was killed in combat.

In 1914, a kind-hearted young girl named Sara Crewe lives in India with her widowed father Richard, a wealthy British Army Officer who shares her love for stories of myths and magic.

Called in to serve in the Great War, Richard enrolls Sara at an all-girls boarding school in New York City that her late mother had attended, which is run by its haughty and spiteful headmistress Maria Minchin, and her kindly sister Amelia.

Instructing Maria to spare no expense for his daughter's comfort, Richard furnishes the school's largest suite and leaves Sara with a locket once owned by her mother and a doll named Emily, which he tells her will keep them connected through magic.

The website's consensus reads: "Alfonso Cuarón adapts Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel with a keen sense of magic realism, vividly recreating the world of childhood as seen through the characters.

[5] Janet Maslin called the film "a bright, beautiful and enchantingly childlike vision", one that "draw[s] its audience into the wittily heightened reality of a fairy tale" and "takes enough liberties to re-invent rather than embalm Miss Burnett's assiduously beloved story".

She concluded: From the huge head of an Indian deity, used as a place where stories are told and children play, to the agile way a tear drips from Sara's eye to a letter read by her father in the rain, A Little Princess has been conceived, staged and edited with special grace.

To see Sara whirling ecstatically in her attic room on a snowy night, exulting in the feelings summoned by an evocative sight in a nearby window, is to know just how stirringly lovely a children's film can be.

[6]Rita Kempley of The Washington Post called the film Cuarón's "dazzling North American [sic] debut" and wrote it "exquisitely re-creates the ephemeral world of childhood, an enchanted kingdom where everything, even make-believe, seems possible ...