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The Tale of Despereaux
17 years ago
I saw "The Tale of Despereaux" this past week. It's an unusual animated movie, but I liked it. The CG animation was very well done. Lots of detail in all the movements and it just looked great. The easiest way I can describe the look is to say it looks like photorealistic storybook artwork if that makes sense. The basic style is clearly derived from storybook art, but it's like it's enhanced towards the photorealistic realm. The end result is something that's clearly storybook art, but seems real at the same time. I liked it.
The structure of the story is rather unusual as well. There are many characters and the story shifts focus between the lives of the different characters for long periods at a time. In other words, long periods pass without seeing certain characters at all, and then the focus of the story shifts again and we're now following a different character. For example, we don't even meet Despereaux until like 30 minutes into the movie, and he's the hero! :) It's unusual, but it definitely seemed to work for the story since a lot of the story is about how the lives of seemingly unrelated characters all affect one another. It's also odd how little character development there is for most of the cast. Quite a few characters are just "there" without any of their background being filled in at all during the story. The most bizarre is the anthropomorphic vegetable guy. It's never explained where he came from and at the end of the story he's basically forgotten about. Very weird.
The other thing about this movie is that it's heavily dialogue based and doesn't have much action at all. The pace of the movie is rather slow overall, and although I'm usually an action fan, it all seemed to hang together and I never got bored watching it. However, I really have to wonder how well this movie goes over on the actual target audience. I don't see how a young kid with a short attention span is going to handle the lengthy dialogue, lack of action and long periods where we don't see certain characters. It seems to me that kids would just get restless and bored with this movie pretty quickly. I'm pretty sure this fact is going to greatly limit the success of this film overall. It's kind of a depressing story in many ways though everything does work out at the end.
Unusual movie, but like I said, I kind of liked it and it was visually great to watch. If you're in the mood for something that's a real departure from the standard animated movies from Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks, then you might want to give this film a try.
The structure of the story is rather unusual as well. There are many characters and the story shifts focus between the lives of the different characters for long periods at a time. In other words, long periods pass without seeing certain characters at all, and then the focus of the story shifts again and we're now following a different character. For example, we don't even meet Despereaux until like 30 minutes into the movie, and he's the hero! :) It's unusual, but it definitely seemed to work for the story since a lot of the story is about how the lives of seemingly unrelated characters all affect one another. It's also odd how little character development there is for most of the cast. Quite a few characters are just "there" without any of their background being filled in at all during the story. The most bizarre is the anthropomorphic vegetable guy. It's never explained where he came from and at the end of the story he's basically forgotten about. Very weird.
The other thing about this movie is that it's heavily dialogue based and doesn't have much action at all. The pace of the movie is rather slow overall, and although I'm usually an action fan, it all seemed to hang together and I never got bored watching it. However, I really have to wonder how well this movie goes over on the actual target audience. I don't see how a young kid with a short attention span is going to handle the lengthy dialogue, lack of action and long periods where we don't see certain characters. It seems to me that kids would just get restless and bored with this movie pretty quickly. I'm pretty sure this fact is going to greatly limit the success of this film overall. It's kind of a depressing story in many ways though everything does work out at the end.
Unusual movie, but like I said, I kind of liked it and it was visually great to watch. If you're in the mood for something that's a real departure from the standard animated movies from Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks, then you might want to give this film a try.
