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 In cinemas now [G]
Director: Sam Fell, Robert Stevenhagen
Running time: 93mins
Years ago, a rat by the name of Roscuro (Dustin Hoffman) came to a kingdom by ship that was obsessed with soup. Having set off a chain of events that result in the death of the Queen and the banning of soup and rats in the kingdom, he is left abandoned in the sewers with the other rats of the kingdom. The kingdom without its soup loses its colour and falls into a mass depression. Fast forward a few years later, a tiny mouse with big ears named Despereaux (Matthew Broderick) is born uncharacteristically brave with a fascination for fairy tales. His readings make him desire nothing more than an adventure of chivalry and courage. An inevitable quest leads him to talk to Princess Pea (Emma Watson) whom he has promised to finish telling her a story about a similar princess in the same situation.
Pretty much before and after this point in the movie, there are about a dozen more characters that have yet to be introduced that could have been condensed, and just about as just as many subplots.
Twenty minutes into the movie I still had no idea as to what the story was actually about. A whole theatre full of silent children gave me the impression that I was not alone. An hour into the movie, I felt like the crying baby in fourth row.
Despereaux suffers from the same problems that made the Golden Compass such a huge disappointment. Too much in too little time us done, new characters suddenly appear to take centre stage before the last anecdote even finished. Despereaux himself becomes a side character in his own movie. So many things are happening in this movie, that it becomes so overly reliant on narration (Sigourney Weaver) to the point where I wondered why she was giving me one useless piece of information at a time.
Fortunately there is a highpoint in the animation, as the characters were well designed and the animators did not skimp out on the details. A standout moment is when the film switches styles into movie medieval paintings as Despereaux reads fairy tales from the book. However the similar monochromatic tones which make up a majority of the backgrounds serve the story too effectively resulting in a dull looking movie. Action scenes try to do their best to alleviate the sagging story, but without any empathy for the characters, the scenes feel lifeless.
All this results in an incredibly boring movie and proof again that state of the art animation alone will not result in a good movie.
So far nobody has been able to best the current animation masters at Pixar and Studio Ghibli with Dreamworks coming up on the rise. Universal's Despereaux is unfortunately one of many to have fallen short of the high standards set by their competitors.
**
ELWOOD LEE
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