The Tale of Despereaux (*½)

Directed by: Sam Fell & Robert Stevenhagen
Starring (voices): Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Watson, Kevin Kline
Seen: January 25th 2009

*½ Out of ****

If anyone ever simply cites animated movies as their favourites, regardless of the title, show them this, they might change their tune. The animation is still beautiful, and there are some small scenes with fantastic alternative animation, but the story simply annoys, and the devices to make things in a mouse/rat world similar to ours are poorly thought through. For instance, I was caught up on the fact that normal matches – their streetlamps – burn out in mere seconds.

Starting out with Roscuro (Hoffman) travelling to the kingdom of Dor, we learn that the kingdom is renowned for its soup, and Roscuro starts smelling it from the ship. In the city, he trails of from his human companion after the smell of the soup, reaching the royal kitchen of Andre (Kline), and making a ruckus there, causing him to flee from the guard, and he eventually ends up in the queen’s soup, giving her a heart attack, and she dies. In his grief, the king bans soup and rats forever, and the kingdom becomes a faded grey relic of what it once was. The rats adapt to living in the dungeons, out of the sunlight, and Roscuro finds this strange to adapt to as a rat who has always been in the sun.

Despereaux is a very cute and strange little mouse, he doesn’t fall in with the usual curriculum of mouse education. He doesn’t cower with fear when he sees a picture of a cat or a carving knife, and he also does not stand back when the other mice warns him not to do anything. He takes cheese out of mouse traps and talks to humans (the princess (Watson) who wishes for thing to be normal again), and this has the community ban him from Mouse World, the incredibly creative name for their city (there is also a rat World). He ends up in rat world and while there is fated to a gladiatorial death sentence in a big arena where the rats have somehow managed to enslave a mangy cat.

Roscuro offers to kill Despereaux in private, but instead takes him to his quarters and they become friend while Roscuro hides Despereaux from the rats. Eventually, like in all stories, this comes to the light and the fight for survival ensues. The problem here is that this film can be pretty scary for its intended demographic, kids. And the story is also written without considering adults, the two don’t gel. Pixar is great at doing both, this film has gone and done the opposite of that. I’ve read of children crying of fright through the film as rats menacingly take humans hostage.

Thinking back on the film now it is also hard to truly remember everything I saw, the whole thing was lost on me. The Tale of Despereaux seems like an admirable effort if you look only at the animation itself, but the story does not back it up, and that is actually what really matters.