Synopsis:
The Tale of Despereaux is a somewhat dark fairy tale type story revolving around death, depression and fear. When Roscuro, a rat, visits the city of Dor and experiences their soup day, he finds himself fallen into the Queen's bowl. When she thinks she has just eaten soup a rat has been in, she dies at the table. The King is so depressed about the death of his wife, he bans soup and rats from the city. Since the whole town is so obsessed with soup, a sadness sweeps the land and it stops raining even though there is a heavy overcast.
Meantime, Despereaux is born and brought up to live like a mouse, to be scared and cowardly, but he does not learn well and faces being thrown into the dungeon for being brave. Upon visiting the library in the castle, he stubles upon the princess and sees how sad she still is. Her quest to him is to finish reading a book he discovered in the library and come back to tell her how it ends. Since mice are not allowed to read, he is thrown into the dungeon when the mouse counsel finds him.
The dungeon is the home of the banished, wild rats and Despereaux is captured and nearly fed to their beast of a cat, until Roscuro saves him. When Despereaux tells Roscuro of the princess and how depressed everyone is since the Queen died, Roscuro wants to go to her and appologize for what happened when he fell in the soup. The Princess, however, wants nothing to do with Roscuro and screams for him to be caught and killed. Roscuro then enlists the help of the very pathetic maid, Miggery, and they plot to kidnapp the princess and feed her to the rats.
Despereaux saves the Princess and some how all is forgiven to Roscuro and Miggery and for now reason at all, everyone lives happily ever after.
While Despereaux is an adorable character, who encompasses bravery, chilvary, honor and gentlemaness, the rest of the movie is pretty depressing. The rats are savages. While good wins out in the end, there are no punishments for wrong deeds, like kidnapping the princess with a butcher knife. The movie basically justifies evil actions if they are committed by good people. This is a movie better released at Halloween than Christmas.
