The Tail of the Desperadaux

Why do animated films about mice have the word "tale" in the title? It just confuses children! I earnestly thought it was gonna be another one of those "fievel goes west" films or something--until I watched the trailer, which looked promising, maybe even engaging. The animation looked decent, if not near-realistic, and the plot, though fantastical, showed promise. Ah! You've guessed it-- I'm only building up all this hype about how I thought it might be all that good ... and was disappointed. Such was The Tale of Desperaux.
The whole first half, I kept internally groaning over the fact that it was just another underdog story, which was more like a peoplehatemecuzI'mdifferentbutI'mactuallybetterthanallofthem story. Another way to tell the kid's "It's okay to be different, even if no one undersands you, because in another dimension, you're awesome. Go find a princess and save her life!" I mean, on the one side, sometimes it's okay to say things like that, and people do need to learn to see things from different people's point-of-view instead of begging them to be like everyone else, for shame or other reasons. But it doesn't mean, also, that they are meant to set off on a Quixotic quest to prove the world wrong, bring back soup and get the girl. The truth is, Don Quixote remained misunderstood and repented of his madness! --i suppose the message is that he was wrong...
And it's another...um...what was I gonna say? Oh, right. it's another story challenging the interpretation of reality. I'm not even going to go on about the author's obscure construction of reality... or the impertinent side-story of the lost daughter. I can't really say that I revile happy endings. There are narratives of epic proportions that the warm resolution is the epitome of ecstasy in the reader--they make you sit up and bug out your eyes and breathe heavily and hope to death that it'll all, indeed, end well.
Like many animated films, the climax didn't really live up to the word, because there was no doubt that soup would return, and quite frankly I could care less--the standards, the goals of the characters were so banal, so immaterial to greatness, that I did not care if the conflict was resolved or not. The author(s) brought the parallel between human life and a animal-human interaction to such an absurd level that I could not sympathise with all of the characters. The nearest I got was the rat whose name I could never make out. He was different--not because he was born that way, but because he was from a different place than the rats he was forced to live with--he was something of a TCK, I guess. He caused a problem and hid away for ages out of fear and the conception that he, a rat, was too small to make a difference in the senseless legislation of royal humanity. He undergoes the most astonishing change through the film. First he is just plain clumsy, and basically driven by his animal impulses--don't account for the fact that he is an animal; what happened to suspension of disbelief. What sets sea rats--one of which our friend with the strange name is--apart from under-city rats is the ability to not be completely gross and evil--bringing to mind the mice/rats in Ratatouille--and their sensitivity to indirect sunlight. Under-city rats revile any form of light from above ground and will scamper away like well behaved mice inder its menacing beams. He can't stand these evil rats--even though he inexplicably has some sort of political power or advantage among them--and voluntarily ostracises himself in their deep lair with a little whole in the wall to look at the gloomy sky. He ends his time of isolation when he learns of the brave little mouse and becomes a "gentleman" with him. So Sancho Panza is tall and guilt-ridden, not short and fat. He tries to solve his problem the gentleman's way--but fails to bridge the rat-human divide (for some reason) and only makes things worse. At this point, he is gripped with insatiable but very focused wrath, driving him to kidnap the (human) princess by manipulating the irrational megalomania of a poor peasant girl. Then he sees the brave little mouse in action again and is reconciled to good--frees the princess and the world is a better place. No wait...it's only better because the cook randomly decided to make soup again, which tirggered nature to go back to its happy state.
Phew! So, the plot had more holes than pumice and I didn't care for the nuances of the message they were communicating--oh, and the animation was . . . ungraceful, and the stylization did not suit my fancy. It looks like something I could have written. But it's been "printed" to the silver screen and they can't take it back, now.
I watched this film last night and basically wrote this as I watched it. In my head. I think I got the jist of it down. I was gonna say more, but it's not that important. I do recommend the film; even if it's just to see how right I was--huehuehuahuhue.hu..hugh....