The tale of Despereaux movie - my thoughts

For starters I want to make a little point. If a movie is an adaptation try -please try- to judge it on its own merit. Take for example a book adaptation: I’m growing pretty tired of people either complaining that the book is better, or people praising a mediocre movie because they loved the book.

I noticed the same when I read reviews about Into the woods. Usually the people who loved the stage play loved the movie. But doesn’t that bias their opinion about the movie?

Now, is the tale of Despereaux a good movie? In my opinion no.

I must admit, I'm biased too. I'm a massive script junkie. If the script (and story on screen) is bad you can throw all kinds of beautiful animation (more about that later) and music into the mix and the end result, to me, is still a bad movie.

I'm sure the book the movie is based upon took its time to connect all the different story-elements. But in the ninety-minute span of this flick it doesn't work. The script meanders between separate story-lines (rat, princes, mouse, and servant-girl) and it takes almost an hour before the film finally starts weaving them together. By this time, I had pretty much given up on caring.[1]

Combine this with the boring character-development (basically the movie cuts to the next storyline the second a character starts to become interesting) and all that's left is a bunch of characters I don't give a hoot about.

You can tell complex fairytales with multiple characters, but not by bluntly introducing them in separate stories. It's like the movie spends the first hour telling me to stare at four main ingredients for soup and the cooking only starts in the last thirty minutes.

A second peeve I had was with the human animations. The animals and backgrounds look great, no problem (a bit outdated by now but that is to be expected). But the human characters look horrid. Especially the princess. She had a very stretched head, razor nose and stapled-on hair -intended to make her look beautiful but as a result makes her look like a botoxed-horse.[2]

The fact that the animators hadn't managed to give her a lot of facial expressions doesn't help the problem. It is like there was a sub-par group of animators working on the humans while the A-team worked on the rodents.

This, results in a split movie. The beautiful Mouse- and Rat world and the ugly humans. It further divides the movie in those separate storylines I just mentioned.

Third peeve, paycheck, paycheck, paycheck. Never before have I seen so many celebrity names on the voice-list of an animated movie (with the exception, perhaps, for Prince of Egypt). I mean, it is great that everybody has work, acting is still a job. And yes, they do a reasonable job (but definitely not great). But I can't shake the feeling that the amount of celebrities involved is the studio’s attempt to mask the bigger problems this movie suffers from. But, this is a rather weak argument, I know.

Fourth peeve, the directing. The first-billed director later on went to make the absolutely brilliant Paranorman. So maybe this movie was a misstep because a lot of the directing felt amateurish straight out of film school. I loved the first long-take shot of following the vegetables into the soup. But after that every single shot isn't very good. Which is weird because 3D animation allows all kinds of amazing shots. The 'camera' can be anywhere. So what went wrong? There’s a second director credited (which is quite common in animated movies) is it his fault? Did the studio meddle with it?

As a fifth, and final little peeve I want to make another point. To paraphrase some people on the Internet: they claim that this movie is too dark and boring for children. This is true. It is a dark tale and yes the script is rather boring. However I politely disagree on the ‘for children’ part because I don't believe in children’s movies. I believe in movies…which some children may watch (and some adults might find annoying).

The sleeping beauty is a great movie, not only for children, I like it too (and I'm older than time). A good ‘children’s’ movie isn’t solely focused on giving children a good time but the audience as a whole.

This is my view on children cinema. And, as such, allows movies to break away from expectations and tropes. Which, sometimes results in complaining parents on the internet.

So, no the Tale of Desperaux isn't the best movie in the world. I believe the main problem is the script and the bad animation on some of the characters.

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[1] It doesn't even start with the right main character rodent. And somehow the timeline between his banishment and Desperaux's birth happen at the same time since the mouse remembers Soupday. Something went wrong during script draft one and thirty-seven. 
[2] I must admit I love insulting a cartoon character on his or her looks. Nobody gets hurt (except the animator...ah shoot...sorry?).