"The Tale of Despereaux" - spoiler movie review

I'd seen the trailer for "The Tale of Despereaux", and it looked really cute, and it had Matthew Broderick in the lead role to boot. OK, I'm in.

So, how'd I like the movie? Well, Despereaux is really cute. See?


Despereaux as a baby.


Despereaux as a child - adolescent?


There's a big division in the film about the difference between a mouse, who are all nice, and a rat, who are all bad, but even in the mouse world, Despereaux is the cutest of them all. He's got the round face and big eyes that are used to depict a more lovable demeanor, so you know he's the star of the show. That is, if you didn't already figure that out from the title of the movie.

But really, what did I think of the movie? Did I mention, Despereaux is really cute? I said that already, huh? Hmmm, ok, well, he is really cute.

Yeah, that's the best thing I can say about the movie.

I really wanted to see the movie that was in the trailer. Unfortunately, the tale of Despereaux was really only about half the movie. I thought it was going to be about Despereaux learning his way in the world, a world where a mouse is supposed to know his place and be scared of humans and their things and to stay away from them and such but instead, he loves all that - kind of like Ariel.

What I didn't expect was a movie about the two-class society and how the upper class oppresses the lower class and how if the upper class doesn't pay enough attention, the lower class is gonna get pissed off enough at some point to rise up against the upper class. Oh, and rats are bad, nasty creatures, the lot of them, whereas mice are civilized and smart and nice.

And of course, soup is the magic elixir that saves the world - it will bring rain and then sunshine, and it can penetrate through fog and clouds, and it will make sad people smile and mean people nice. If only people would fixate on soup, all would be right with the world.

For me, the movie was very "beat you over the head" in its storytelling, and there were many cases where the dialogue, or more specifically, the narration was just incredibly trite. There's one point where the narrator talks about a princess being locked away in a prison, but as long as you have hope, you're never really in prison. Puh-leeze.

And when the story wasn't being obvious and trite, it was boring. I didn't really care about the division of the classes, and there's a whole other side of the story involving Roscuro, some rat who isn't very rat-like but more like a mouse, and he's the whole other half of the movie, but you never hear anything about him in the trailer at all.


Roscuro looking a bit like Rat Sparrow.


The story being told above ground - with the king and his daughter the princess being the upper class and the servant girl Miggery Sow being the lower class - has its parallels below ground - with the mice being the upper class since they're eating good things like cheese and have access to books and such and like the light whereas the rats are the lower class because they have to scrounge and eat bugs and worms and rotted things and they prefer to be in the dark. Sweet Miggery Sow seems to turn on a dime against her mistress the princess just as Roscuro turns on the same dime against Despereaux and all that Despereaux stands for.


Doesn't Miggery Sow look like she should be in a Shrek movie? Or maybe I'm thinking of "Where the Wild Things Are". Or something else entirely.


The whole thing with the cooking and mice being around it so reminded me of "Ratatouille", and it reminded me that I'd much rather be watching that film.

Speaking of cooking, they never explained how the magical Vegetable Man was conjured to appear to help make soup and then enlisted for battle duty.


Despereaux goes to rescue the princess - better bring vegetables.


I really didn't care for the look that was used to portray the royal family in the film, with their elongated faces and REALLY LONG noses that connected the top half and bottom half of their faces after they had been pulled apart.


Princess Stretched Face.


And similiarly, I didn't care for the animation style of the story-within-a-story segments with the knight and such. That bored me too.


But it was cool to see the imprisoned cat eventually get a meal.


The voice-overs were all generally good. Matthew Broderick tried to be as interesting as the story would let him be. I had no clue Dustin Hoffman was in this film, but then Roscuro wasn't in the trailer at all, was he? Kevin Kline was good as the chef, Stanley Tucci was good as Vegetable Man, and Frank Langella was unsurprisingly excellent as the wicked mayor of Ratworld. Oh, and Sigourney Weaver was good as the narrator, even though her lines were bad and I'd rather she were on the Axiom telling its captain about all the wonderful things that used to be on Earth like pizza.


I guess for animated movies, I need to pretty much just stick with Disney and Blue Sky.