Despereaux

Animations were never something I went gaga over and while an occasional ‘Kung Fu Panda’ is welcome, watching plastic dolls prancing for two hours isn’t my best description of an evening well entertained. And this is exactly the reason why I went and really enjoyed Despereaux. Despereaux worked with me because it’s an animation of a different sort. It is not those plasticized, shiny kinds that seem to have become the hallmark of a well animated movie, but one that looks and feels like something straight out of a children’s handbook. While Despereaux definitely scores big on animation it loses some points due to its convoluted plotline.

The movie revolves around Dor; a fairytale kingdom in which princesses converse with mice, rats have a well-organised union and soup is the principal cause that calls for annual celebrations. Roscuro (voice over by Dustin Hoffman) is a hungry shipwreck rat that reaches the Dor kingdom on soup festival day. Just as the chef is able to unveil his greatest concoction to the empire, Roscuro finds himself in the Queen’s bowl of soup, scaring her to death. The fiasco results in the King going into depression, the chef losing his magical culinary powers and the rats being forever banned from the kingdom. This core plot is complicated several times over by numerous subplots and being a children’s movie, this the unnecessary complexity will rankle the audience.

All in all it would be fair to say that the elegant animation was let down by a mediocre storyline.