The Tale of Despereaux (2008)

The Tale of Despereaux arrives from 2008, a year when animated features could still concern themselves with soup. The kingdom of Dor loses its queen to a rat in a bowl, the grieving king bans broth and rodents alike, and the realm sinks into damp misery. A mouse with oversized ears reads books and dreams of knighthood. A rat with a conscience wants to apologize. There is a deaf servant girl who longs to be a princess, a jailer who is her father, and a genie who lives in a cooking pot. The film is loosely adapted from Kate DiCamillo's novel. It keeps the gentleness and discards the shape, and it imports no contemporary instruction whatsoever.

Consider the ledger. The cast is almost entirely white and almost entirely British, a fact the film treats as unremarkable. Princess Pea and Mig exist as characters, not arguments, and the film never interrogates the arrangement that puts one above the other. Despereaux's ears are a running visual gag and a mark of his difference, but the story frames that difference as courage, which is a virtue the mouse council finds inconvenient, not a category of identity. The rats live under a warlike regime, and the film's objection to it is moral, not economic. When the king lifts his ban and the rain stops, we are watching a fable about grief and forgiveness, the oldest machinery in the storytelling shed.

The result is a film made in a different cultural decade, because it was. It has a tabby cat, a heart-shaped locket, and a climactic beam of sunlight, and it asks nothing beyond a mild sympathy for small creatures who want to be brave. Critics at the time found it handsome and thin. Audiences agreed, more or less, and the box office was unkind. We are left with a pleasant, well-drawn artifact whose moral instruction is confined to the proposition that soup should be legal. That is a position we can all endorse.