The Tale of Despereaux (2008)

Before I begin with this movie, I want to talk about you guys for a minute.  That's you, readers, you swirls of amorphous possibility within the teeming cosmos of the interwebz.  You guys are hilarious.  Blogger lets me track my stats (which I look at obsessively) by country, by operating system, and by traffic sources.  That gets broken down even further until I can see what random crap you are putting into Google that somehow gets you to my page.  Some of my favorites:

Johnny Hansen -- I don't know who this is and I don't remember ever writing about him but apparently people are looking for him and getting to me.  I cannot help you.

Penny Tweedy lost the coin toss to...?  --  This I actually covered, so yay, Internet!  Bless you, you little Secretariat fan, whoever you are.

Lucyano salazar secks -- I don't even know where to begin with this.  From the spelling, I'd guess that either someone was trying to get around a censor or they are 12 and just can't spell.  Either way, haha!

And the number one search... 
Every possible combination of the words "Johnny Depp" and "Mad Hatter".  You guys.  You do me proud.  /wipes away tear

Enough of this crap.  Let's destroy a children's movie!

  This movie had a lot going for it.  There's a huge voice cast including Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, Sigourney Weaver, Tracey Ullman, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Kline and a couple of the Harry Potter people, Emma Watson (Hermione) and Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid).  The animation is beautiful, especially the background work and the way they handled the light of the movie.

The only sticking point is the story. 

A ship rat comes to the country of Dor in order to taste their famous soup.  He sneaks into the royal hall, falls off a chandelier into the Queen's bowl and scares her into a heart attack.  The heartbroken King immediately bans both soup and rats from the city, somehow plunging it into an overcast drought, thus setting up the movie's theme about unintended consequences. 

A fearless mouse is born and reads a fairytale about knights rescuing princesses.  He meets the actual Princess who tells him that she wants the soup to come back, the rain to come back, and even the rats to come back.  With his imagination fired by the story he read, he vows to do just that.  He goes back home and tells the other mice who immediately banish him into the sewer to live with the rats.  There he meets the rat who started this whole chain of events.  The rat tries to apologize to the Princess for killing her mom and everything but she freaks out so he instead convinces a simple-minded serving girl to kidnap her and give her to the Head Rat where she will be eaten.

At this point, you could be forgiven for thinking that the rat is supposed to be the main character here instead of the Dumbo-eared mouse.

This is a children's movie so you can pretty much guess how everything ends up, although they did leave an out for a sequel.  It's a cute film overall if you run across it but I wouldn't put a lot of effort into searching it out.