THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX: Review
First, there is only one Pixar. In addition to being fact, this is also the truth.
But just because there is only one Pixar, doesn't mean that other companies can't (or shouldn't) make animated films. I’ve already raved about Meet the Robinsons. Shrek (the first) is a minor classic. Robots had a good amount of charm. And Madagscar 2: Escape to Africa cracks me up just thinking about it.
But then there are movies like The Tale of Desperaux, where Pixar doesn’t even enter into it, except to say that they would never have attempted a movie like this. Not because it’s inherently a bad idea: mouse versus world, based on award winning novel. The problem is that the script was nowhere near read for filming. Source material is not enough. Golden Compass was also based on an award winning novel. And like Golden Compass, The Tale of Desperaux is made with love, care, and total incompetence.
Here are the various plots, as I understand them:
a) A young mouse is rejected from his home for his bravery and refusal to cower. He is brave and wants to be a knight.
b) A rat is an outcast for liking the sunlight and eating regular people food. He is sad.
c) A princess misses the rain, soup, and even the rats, and is sad.
d) A princess’s maid wishes to be a princess, and is bitter.
e) A chef is banned from making soup, and is berated by a magical vegetable man.
Got all that? There is also a sad human king who plays his guitar/ukulele thing because of his wife’s soup-related death, an evil rat king who is evil because it’s fun, a cat that thinks it is the beast from Return of the Jedi. Also, for reasons often narrated but seldom explained, because the king banned soup, the sun disappeared and the rain stopped and the color vanished from the land.
The movie makes about as much sense as Dune, and has a similar array of stars embarrassing themselves. Among the guilty parties include Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, Emily Watson, Frank Langella, William H. Macy and Signorney Weaver, who has the worst job of the bunch, as the narrator. And she narrates endlessly, often pointlessly. (“Rats are rats, and nothing can change a rat.” “What would it be like for your name to be a bad word? How would that make you feel?” “How could you outlaw something as natural as the sun?”) This may work as the voice on the page, but here, it grinds the proceedings to a halt every time she opens her mouth.
The narration would be enough to sink the movie, but other choices torpedo it into oblivion. The plot rarely makes sense, as we constantly move between stories we understand little and care about less. There are too many characters, and the confusion compounds when some characters turn evil and then sympathetic, sometimes in the same scene. Desperaux, as the movie’s apparent lead, never changes much on his journey, and makes for an uninvolving, if plucky protagonist. (He's really brave!) (Really!) To call the ending an anticlimax would be an insult to anti-climaxes, as all the problems of the plot are resolved simply because the narrator says so (someone explain to me the relationship between soup and whether or not it rains.)
Because one poor choice deserves another, the movie’s creators are disciples of the Nathanial Hawthorne School of Lead Pipe Symbolism: each point about racism, facism, cowardice and how ugly people are invariably selfish lands with a cringe-inducing THUD on your head. See? Rats, like people, can change too! See, racism is bad, kids. So is banning soup. So is getting in fights with a magical vegetable man.
There is one scene where the movie comes to life. When Desperaux first reads a storybook, the images come to life in a wonderful stylized sequence. Rousing music is played, and we see why someone would want to drop everything to become a knight. It works. If they had followed that impulse, instead of all the racism allegories, we might have had something.
To be clear: the movie is competently animated and the dialogue is serviceable. The actors do what they can. All the raw materials are there for a wonderful fable, but the final product feels like someone left entire chunks of eggshell in the cake batter. I don’t care how noble your intentions are: the cake is inedible, and the movie is unwatchable. Give me Bolt anyday.
GRADE: * Star (Out of Five)
P.S. This movie is as bad as Golden Compass, but Golden Compass at least had Sam Elliot’s Moustache and Nicole Kidman slapping a monkey.
P.P.S. This movie, like Reign of Fire, has a false dragon advertising problem. Namely, there are no dragons in the movie, except for a dream sequence. Someone alert the Nerd Police. Oh, and here's the vegetable man:
