The Tale of Despereaux: Critic Reviews

The Tale of Despereaux looks like an illuminated manuscript brought to life. Too bad the story's such a mess.

Despereaux is a pleasantly immersive, beautifully animated, occasionally sleepy tale.

It is supposed to be a heart-melter, but my heart stayed the temperature of a phial of liquid nitrogen left overnight on the surface of Pluto.

While the story does not quite come to magical life, the themes of courage, hope and decency are sweetly inspiring.

It's a beautiful film, but in the end, Despereaux is esthetically charmed but dramatically inert.

A skillfully managed fairy tale about a mouse, a rat, and fairy tales in general.

The film dispenses entirely with the bathroom humor that has become a standard element in so much kids entertainment.

The Tale of Despereaux is one of the most beautifully drawn animated films I've seen, rendered in enchanting detail and painterly colors by an art department headed by Oliver Adam.

I admired the craft more than I loved the results. But The Tales of Despereaux is still better-than-average animation.

The imagery is colorful and artfully rendered, but the filmmakers, favoring technological wizardry over story, have beefed up the narrative with teeming rodent civilizations, a seafaring sequence, and gladiatorial action pieces.

Despereaux is a little too desperate to be loved.

Flat-footed when it should be fleet, scary when it means to be exciting, and only intermittently emotionally effective, The Tale of Despereaux does a disservice to Kate DiCamillo's well-regarded children's book.

The Tale of Despereaux gathers a host of vocal talent for a relatively complicated story of heroism and loyalty, requiring that its young audience pay attention and is all the more rewarding for it (for kids and grown-ups).

This graphically well-rendered kidpic is less crass and mouthy than many recent feature-length toons, but also more sluggish and ungainly as it tries to approximate DiCamillo's singularly delicate tone.

Somber, slow and elegant instead of frantic and dazzling. It works like a beloved fairy tale.

There's precious little space in Despereaux's tale for heroism (save for the third act) and humor.

. The plot is too convoluted and there are too many characters to keep track of.

Like the old adage about too many cooks, The Tale of Despereaux is full of ideas, but the combination is more perturbing than satisfying.

The Tale of Despereaux looks like it was made about 10 years ago and, at a time when even mediocre animated films can generally boast a stunning look, this movie's uninspired animation is a source of disappointment.

The magic is minuscule in this handsome-looking but drearily told animated tale.

Whereas the gorgeous, sophisticated Ratatouille was both a crowd-pleaser and a critical favorite, duly winning the Academy Award for best animated feature, Despereaux feels obvious, preachy and heavy-handed.

Despereaux is a rare creature, not only for the handmade look and subtlety of its computer-generated imagery but also for its irony-free embrace of once-upon-a-time storytelling.

It amounts to less than the sum of its artfully conceived parts but remains a nice and visually interesting film.

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