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The Tale of Despereaux Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: G Genre: Animated, Family, Fantasy Theater release: December 19, 2008 by Universal Pictures Directed by: Sam Fell and Robert Stevenhagen Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes Cast: Matthew Broderick (Despereaux), Dustin Hoffman (Roscuro), Emma Watson (Princess Pea), Tracey Ullman (Miggery Sow), Kevin Kline (Andre), William H. Macy (Lester), Stanley Tucci (Boldo), Ciarán Hinds (Botticelli), Frances Conroy (Antoinette), Frank Langella (Mayor), Richard Jenkins (Principal), Christopher Lloyd (Hovis) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Kate DiCamillo's book The Tale of Despereaux is an enchanting story about a mouse with the heart of a hero. Already considered a classic, this Newberry Award winner is a favorite of families and children's librarians everywhere.

And now The Tale of Despereaux—or something resembling it—is a movie. Director Sam Fell is no stranger to rodents; he directed Dreamworks' Flushed Away. But where Flushed was a cartoon caper, Despereaux is a poetic work of children's literature that deserves a place alongside such classics as Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh stories, White's Charlotte's Web, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Fell and his co-director Rob Stevenhagen respect their source enough to illustrate it with lush and extravagant animation. Newcomers accustomed to frantic, frivolous, disposable family fare are likely to be surprised and enthralled.

But what about DiCamillo's fans? Is this Tale what they've dreamed of seeing on the big screen?

Not exactly. This is more like Despereaux on Steroids—a sprawling, complicated, schizophrenic tale that may be the strangest family film since Babe: Pig in the City.

Despereaux, the courageous mouse, voice by Matthew Broderick

It's a simple story: Despereaux is born an eccentric mouse with enormous ears. Breaking the rules that all good mice follow—Cower! Scurry! Be afraid!—he follows his super-sized heart right up into the palace, where the beautiful Princess Pea, lonely and sad, is trapped in the gloom brought on by the loss of her mother, who died of shock when she found a rat in her soup. Smitten by this broken-hearted beauty, Despereaux's inner White Knight awakens. He vows to honor and serve the princess.

But fraternizing with humans brings a harsh judgment: Despereaux's fellow mice sentence him to hard time in "Ratworld," a festering underworld where the hateful rats—exiled for scaring the queen to death—are plotting and conspiring.

Meanwhile, one of the princess's servant girls—the unfortunately named Miggery Sow—is cooking up hatred of her own, jealous of the princess's glory. And before you know it, Princess Pea is a damsel in distress, and it's up to Despereaux to save the day and reconcile the Kingdom of Dor with Roscuro the rat—the rodent who accidentally fell into the soup and changed the course of history.

Most of this narrative has made it to the screen intact, illustrated with astonishing artistry that feels like a different art form than the three-dimensional razzle-dazzle of Pixar. Where Disney's style is crisp and shiny, Framestore Feature Animation makes us feel we've gone to the Louvre and walked right into paintings by Vermeer or Brueghel, scenes of breathtaking subtlety and texture.

(And by the way, if anybody tells you that Despereaux steals from Pixar's Ratatouille, they're wrong. This story's been around since long before Remy ever ventured into the kitchen. But isn't it a fascinating coincidence that the villains in both pictures are fashioned to resemble Nosferatu?)

Princess Pea, voiced by Emma Watson

Despereaux's characters are uniquely memorable, and enlivened by a perfect cast. Dustin Hoffman makes Roscuro the Rat both pathetic and sym-pathetic. Ciarán Hinds brings out the malevolent beast in Botticelli. Emma Watson (Hermione in the Harry Potter films) is enchanting as the delicate beauty Princess Pea. Among the many fine talents, Richard Jenkins stands out as the Principal of Despereaux's school, and Tracey Ullman makes the strongest impression of all, playing the disconsolate pig herder Miggery Sow.

Voiced by Matthew Broderick, Despereaux himself has youthful charm and panache to spare. He's the perfect choice to play this miniature champion.

And what a charming champion he is. Few animated characters rival Baby Despereaux's cuteness factor. The scenes of his education in just how mice should cower before all the things that should scare them are some of the film's most hilarious and delightful sequences.

But he's not exactly the Despereaux of the book. That impetuous spark of a character has become something almost brash, a laughing, leaping swashbuckler. In the book, his love for music awakens him to the beauty of Princess Pea's human world; in the movie, he seems to have lost all interest in the "honey" of the king's melancholy guitar.

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