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Review - The Tale of Despereaux
Oct. 17th, 2009 10:28 amJust watched The Tale of Despereaux - well, watched bits of it - and was going to put my review in an LJ-cut, but... well, it won't take much space.
The basic premise is this: a rat falls in some soup, causing a queen to have a heart attack and die. As a result, the king bans soup. And rats.
Obviously.
Anyway, as any halfway competent student of the natural sciences will predict, this causes clouds to blanket the skies and a severe drought to plague the land. For several years. As it does.
Then some stuff happens, a rat appears, a Dumbo sort of mouse turns up, and some more stuff happens. I kind of tuned out.
Plot-wise, it's a mess. It's all over the place, and the narration is both patronising and largely redundant. OK, so it's for kids, but that's no reason to make it simplistic. In my experience, kids will tend to try to understand things unless you tell them they don't have to try.
Anyway, it's pretty (although the human characters are more My Little Pony than Uncanny Valley), but then everyone will have said that, so sod it.
In the end I got bored rigid about 30-40 minutes in. I can't believe I wasted a couple of weeks of Tesco DVD Rental getting round to watching the blasted thing.
In summary: Dull, pretty, condescending and slapdash. Watch the trailer, though, it's got all the good bits in it.
The basic premise is this: a rat falls in some soup, causing a queen to have a heart attack and die. As a result, the king bans soup. And rats.
Obviously.
Anyway, as any halfway competent student of the natural sciences will predict, this causes clouds to blanket the skies and a severe drought to plague the land. For several years. As it does.
Then some stuff happens, a rat appears, a Dumbo sort of mouse turns up, and some more stuff happens. I kind of tuned out.
Plot-wise, it's a mess. It's all over the place, and the narration is both patronising and largely redundant. OK, so it's for kids, but that's no reason to make it simplistic. In my experience, kids will tend to try to understand things unless you tell them they don't have to try.
Anyway, it's pretty (although the human characters are more My Little Pony than Uncanny Valley), but then everyone will have said that, so sod it.
In the end I got bored rigid about 30-40 minutes in. I can't believe I wasted a couple of weeks of Tesco DVD Rental getting round to watching the blasted thing.
In summary: Dull, pretty, condescending and slapdash. Watch the trailer, though, it's got all the good bits in it.
