by Jenny Jones
After all the hype made about this movie, I was extremely disappointed when I finally sat through the entire thing. If Stephen Schaefer of The Boston Herald truly believes that this is “The best of the year’s animated movies…” then this must have been the only one he saw. Though its creators had good intentions of instilling valuable morals and positive behaviors in our children, it attempted to convey too many messages at once, became far too complicated and ended up being one of the worst animated movies I have watched with my children in a while.
Based on the 2003 award winning children’s fantasy book written by Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux is supposed to be the story of a little mouse with Dumbo-like ears who stands out from all the other mice, not only because of his appearance, but more so because of his courageous behavior and passion for knowledge. Originally told as 4 short stories that all come together in the final book, the movie seems to have done what all Hollywood adaptations tend to do, which is to deviate too much from the original plot. The end result was a choppy narrative that involved far too many secondary characters, too many sub-stories and became very difficult for viewers (especially children) to follow. It ended up feeling too long and ultimately we were all so lost in the meaningless details that we became bored.
Like all good fairytales, The Tale of Despereaux begins with “Once upon a time…” The opening scene with all of it’s hustle and bustle of intimately drawn characters and an all star cast of voices including Dustin Hoffman, Matthew Broderick, Tracy Ullman, Emma Watson and Kevin Kline (just to name a few) sets the stage for what could have been a wonderfully magical story of chivalry and honor. Unfortunately the movie seemed to focus more on the life events of the secondary character, Chairoscuro the rat, rather then on that of our main character, Despereaux.
In summary, The Tale of Despreeaux was the story of a rat, a brave little mouse, a princess and a bowl of soup. No wait, it was the story of an ugly, jealous village girl abandoned and then reunited with her estranged father. Well, then again it could have been the story of a heart broken king and his ban of all soup in the kingdom and his order to kill all the rats in the town of Dor. Or, maybe it was really about the underlying environmental impact of what happens when you remove all creatures of one species from their ecosystem. Who cares? It just became too hard to follow the number of complicated stories and messages that were weaving through this movie. Furthermore, for a fairytale there were very little exciting action scenes, no sword fights, duels, knights on horseback, witches, goblins, or interesting little woodsy characters. I found myself, and eventually my children, quickly losing interest.
For what it is worth, I found the animation of Roscuro and Despereaux to be absolutely outstanding. Their every twitch and smirk was captured perfectly. However the rest of the cast of characters were unremarkable and seemed emotionless. If you are going to watch The Tale of Despereaux be prepared for cutesy wootsie but not very much else.
The only element of this movie that I found truly enchanting was Sigourney Weaver’s voice as narrator. Every time she spoke I was completely enthralled in her every word. Unfortunately the story itself was just too complicated, too choppy, too boring and too long.
5.5 / 10
