From Page to Screen
The Tale of Despereaux movie review

by Claire E. Gross

The Tale of Despereaux, directed for the big screen by Sam Fell and Robert Stevenhagen and written by Will McRobb, is not so much an adaptation of Kate DiCamillo’s Newbery-winning book as it is a re-imagining. The movie borrows and reworks the basic components of the novel, but it takes significant liberties with both plot and theme. In the original, a mouse addicted to beauty, a rat entranced by light, and a serving girl who longs to be a princess find their stories entwined when two of the three conspire to kidnap the princess of the castle in which they all live, and the third aspires to save her. But the story is more complicated than that: the mouse, Despereaux, is consigned to certain death by his own family for the crime of being different; Roscuro the rat doesn’t learn until the very end of the tale to overcome his darker side; and the girl, Miggery Sow, was sold into servitude by a father now serving time in Roscuro’s dungeon home.

The movie brightens this grim setup considerably. Despite a certain amount of schmaltz in the tone, the book is fueled by truly dark elements — animalistic cruelty, paternal betrayal, even child abuse (Mig is nearly deaf from too many clouts to the ear) — and it makes sense that the powers that be would seek to blunt those edges for mass consumption. So the movie is instead fueled by the somewhat silly premise that the king’s ban on soup throws a literal cloud over the kingdom, forcing its subjects to exist in perpetual sunless drought. (Soup, in fact, is disproportionately central to the movie premise: the kingdom is rife with “Long Live Soup!” banners, and when the French chef finally caves and makes soup again, its aroma causes the sun to burst forth at a key moment. Even the chef’s magical assistant, an original-to-the-movie human-shaped composite of fruits and vegetables seemingly created to show off the animators’ skill, eventually has a role in the climax. On the character front, Roscuro is now a sea rat, consigned to the dungeons by mistake, his villainy confined to a single bad choice; Despereaux, now naturally brave instead of forced into it by necessity, is banished rather than sentenced to a cruel death. As for Mig, she is much the same (minus the “cauliflower ears” formed of her beatings), but the princess she kidnaps is more self-absorbed than in the book, which lessens the impact of Mig holding her at knifepoint. And, of course, Mig’s father (here combined with the jailkeeper character) was a victim of trickery, not greed.

The production values are excellent, from an animation palette suffused with earthy browns and pastoral pastels to a soundtrack that balances the somber with the whimsical. In fact, the animation is quite beautiful, particularly a stylized story-within-a-story sequence that brilliantly distinguishes itself from the “real world” of the main narrative. The storytelling is similarly smooth, interweaving three or more plot strands at any given time into a cohesive, smartly paced whole. The star-studded voice cast is able and unobtrusive, their celebrity fading into the characters they portray (all except Kevin Kline as the French chef, who goes over the top with the flamboyant role). And while certain scenes uncomfortably recall Ratatouille and, more bizarrely, Star Wars (with Despereaux, tossed into an arena to face a feral cat, playing Luke Skywalker), the film overall manages to carve out its own Disney-esque identity, balancing the protagonists’ frequent peril with humor and elaborate chase sequences. It’s only in character development that it falters: in Despereaux and Roscuro, DiCamillo created the perfect foils — mirror images, light and dark, each with a kernel of difference inside them. The movie recasts them in the well-traversed “general misfit” vein, making Despereaux in particular just one more cute rodent hero.

Despereaux-the-film is solid moviemaking — and decent storytelling. But without the balance of dark undercurrents, it lacks the staying power of DiCamillo’s book. The resonance of redemption, the gravitas of forgiveness, the emotional relief of a hard-won happy ending are missing. Maybe that’s just smart business, but I can’t help but feel the loss. Despereaux-the-book was positively brimming with literary elements—the gather-round-now narrative voice, the accentuated metaphors and motifs, the intricate network of connection that bound the plot and characters. All that, sadly, has been excised. What’s left? Plenty of what made the tale so accessible, but little of what made it acclaimed.

Claire E. Gross is assistant editor of the Horn Book Magazine.

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