The Tale of Despereaux

2008 talking mouse movie

Rating: 9/20 (Jen: 13/20; Emma: 15/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: During the kingdom's annual soup festival, soup aficionado Ratso Rizzo, a rat, sneaks into the queen's bowl and scares her to death. The soup festival is cancelled, indefinitely, and it no longer rains, incomprehensibly. Everybody's sad. Dumbo the Mouse, Ratso, a farm girl with Downs Syndrome, and a wacky vegetable man have to save the day. Too bad they couldn't save the movie!

I didn't like a single thing about this blander-than-bland movie. I didn't like the bland characters, walking and talking cliches, and the actors providing the voices did nothing to inject them with any personality. It's a Who's Who of People Who Got Paid a Lot to Do Voices in This Movie. I didn't like the bland music. I'm not a composer, but if there wasn't music in this movie, I'm pretty sure I could have hummed a more interesting score. I hated the bland animation, from the colorless settings to the expressionless characters. This was truly an ugly film. The action sequences were dull, and the intermittent humor was humorless. If you'd have told me that there was a character made from vegetables in this, I would have been excited, but that character seemed out of place and confused me more than anything else. Actually, a lot of this fairy tale cross-pollination mish-mash crap confused me. Maybe the problem was that I couldn't get past trying to imagine what it would look like if Despereaux and the princess "got it on" because even though a theme of this story is that you can change the world for the better no matter how small you are, I'm not sure we can extend that idea into the realm of erotic love. I don't think the princess could have ever been sexually satisfied by Despereaux. Oh, well. Maybe we'll find out in the sequel--Despereaux Gets Some Tail. I wasn't expecting much from this anyway (I couldn't even finish the fairly short book), but this extremely flat and personality-free movie ended up being worse than expected.