Once upon a time there was a charming tale of a wee little mouse with wide-open eyes and ears as large as saucers. Named Despereaux Tilling, the mouse grew up, though not by much, to become a reader of books and the besotted friend of a lovely human princess named Pea. In time he saved the day, battling an army of rats, and won the hearts of millions of readers and eventually a contract with a Hollywood studio. This is how the book “The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread” became a computer-animated movie, though without the rambling subtitle and as many eccentricities.
Being a Hollywood story of a mouse, a princess, some soup and thread — not to mention rats, hats and a girl named Mig with the unfortunate looks of a pig — the movie “The Tale of Despereaux” offers up other changes too. It begins as all fairy tales should, with a narrator (an efficient, somewhat cool-sounding Sigourney Weaver) recounting the story of the pastel-hued Kingdom of Dor, where the peasants were content, the rulers were just, and the rats scuttled about unmolested. The balm for this peaceable kingdom was soup, a fragrant broth that flowed out of the royal kitchen and into the waiting bowls of the populace. But good times turned to bad when a rat named Roscuro (Dustin Hoffman) fell into the queen’s soup, producing a fatal reaction.
Directed by Sam Fell and Rob Stevenhagen and written by Gary Ross (who also served as one of the producers), “Despereaux” is a pleasantly immersive, beautifully animated, occasionally sleepy tale. Like most American animated movies, it centers on a plucky hero (softly voiced by Matthew Broderick) who, against the nominal odds (though, really, the odds are always stacked in his favor), overcomes adversity of some kind.
