Despereaux's Tale Falls Short

What’s most disappointing about The Tale of Despereaux is that while it had the potential to be a fun, light-hearted, animated feature with a strong moral message, it sadly fell as short as Despereaux himself. Even the all-star talented voice cast – including Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Watson, Tracey Ullman, Kevin Kline, William H. Macy, Stanley Tucci, Robbie Coltrane Richard Jenkins, Christopher Lloyd and Sigourney Weaver as the narrator – couldn’t make up for this animated feature’s short comings.

In the faraway kingdom of Dor, a soup-related accident resulted in the banning of rats and soup from the kingdom, leaving the townsfolk in despair without sunlight or hope. Desperaux comes along as the brave mouse who doesn’t know how to cower, who quickly finds himself banned to the rat dungeon for speaking with a human. A vengeful rat named Roscuro (voiced by Dustin Hoffman) has the princess of the kingdom kidnapped and it’s up to Desperaux to save her.

It all sounds simple enough to work well as a children’s tale. And, on its own the film does work. It’s in the audience that the problem lies. I’m not quite sure who Universal Pictures was targeting when they signed up “visionary filmmaker Gary Ross”, who here animates his first feature, but there’s definitely an audience identity crisis of sorts going on here, and sadly I feel this film falls into an audience void.

For children, it’s simply not really all that fun to watch. The front railing of the theatre I was in was vibrating from a restless six year old banging their feet in restless boredom against it. It’s also not really all that funny, with the exception of a few cute moments involving Desperaux as he’s growing up. Content-wise it’s a little bit frightening – you have your hero about to be eaten by a cat while the rats cheer on, and later rats racing and chomping at the bit to devour the kidnapped princess. Light and fluffy - definitely not.

As far as the adult audience-goers are concerned, they’re not having fun either. Bored with the lack of action and the constant overly-expositional narration, there are also very few higher-level ‘adult’ jokes to chuckle at.

Really, in the end the shame is that the morality of the story, regarding strength of character, forgiveness and breaking down prejudice is at too high of a level for children to grasp, and completely, unoriginally obvious if you’re an adult.

I wish I’d gone to see Bolt instead.