The Tale of Despereaux proves that a big name cast can't help a mediocre animated feature. Practically every voice in it is recognizable, but apart from a flicker of recognition when you realize who is who, there's really no point in most of them since most of them are just cameo voices. Christopher Lloyd for example, has about 4 lines in one scene. More time spent tightening the script and less in finding famous actors would have been a wiser use of resources.
Matthew Broderick voices Despereaux, a tiny, but brave little mouse, in a kingdom saddened by the death of its Queen. She was frightened by a rat and collapsed into her bowl of soup. The distraught King makes rats and soup illegal. Most places this wouldn't have been such a big deal, but in this kingdom, oddly enough, soup is the national meal and Soup Day is bigger than Christmas. The mere absence of soup from the kingdom makes the skies overcast and rain disappear.
Despereaux is an odd little mouse. He refuses to scurry and cower and instead of eating books, he reads them; dreaming of becoming a knight. He eventually befriends Princess Pea voiced by Emma Watson (Hermione in the Harry Potter movies), who is depressed over the death of her mother. Despereaux's odd behavior eventually causes him to be banished from Mouseworld and sent down to Ratworld, a dark and foreboding place in the dungeon. There he meets Roscuro, voiced by Dustin Hoffman, the rat who frightened the Queen to death. He's living under the cruel thumb of the Rat King; an evil looking rat who resembles Count Orlock from Nosferatu, whose back story is never really developed. Oh, there's also a subplot involving Miggery Sow, voiced by Tracy Ullman, the deaf scullery maid who dreams of being a princess.
The number of characters and the over-involved plot are just two of this movie's problems. In a cartoon it helps to keep the plot, not simple necessarily, but concentrated. There should be a clear cut goal for the hero to accomplish and that goal should be worthwhile. The goal here is to return soup to the kingdom, but there's no simple way to do that, so in the meantime a whole bunch of other stuff happens, not all of which is very interesting or works all that well and it's hard to get emotionally invested in soup.
What does work is the animation. It looks like a children's book sprung off the page. Despereaux is cute, with his big ears and eyes. The backgrounds and details, are all very well done and quite distinctively. Visually there's nothing to complain about, except that I ended up wishing there were more interesting things to be animated.
The moral of this tale is that in the order of importance, the script is the most important thing. Excellent and famous voice-work, coupled with really well-done animation doesn't add up to a good movie without that script to start with.
