The Tale of Despereaux

Once upon a time there was a tiny little mouse who, unlike the other mice around him, lived by a code of honor, believed in justice, and always spoke the truth.

Well, he would have been all that, except in the advanced state of postmodern decay of our culture, the words "honor," "justice," and "truth" have lost all their former meaning. The mouse never got to embody any of those things because the people who made The Tale of Despereaux had no idea what those words meant.

Supposedly the mouse is exceptional partly because he "tells the truth." In classical narrative, this kind of character must be put to the test. Truth-telling is important when it becomes painful to do so. But nowhere is the mouse put to any kind of test of his honor in that way. There is absolutely nothing in this movie about keeping one's word. This is absolutely the most central concept in classical honor, and without it, the entire story is just so much bullshit.

Actually for the first hour, I was really hooked. It seemed exactly my kind of movie. If I sound bitter, it is because I feel swindled. The point at which I felt betrayed occurred when one of the previously "honorable" characters suddenly decides to do something very dishonorable. It was so confusing that at first I thought it was all a ruse. But it was not. Thus the movie is not at all about honor, but about dishonor. It is a lucid dissertation in the postmodern concept that no truly honorable people exist, but that everyone is prone to commit arbitrarily dishonorable acts at a moment's notice in order to gain personal advantage.

By the end of the film, the narrative falls completely apart. The climax seems to come in mixed-up order, as if it were written by multiple screenwriters all trying to get in their moment of glory.

The only part of the movie I enjoyed (other than the splendid 3-D animation) was the classification of people into two categories: mice (who are timid, and who cower in fear) and rats (who are cruel degraded spirits who live in the gutter, and who lie and betray). This duality is one of the essential theses of advanced postmodernism, and I was pleased to see it spelled out so cleanly. It was the most literal depiction of the concept I call "The Postmodern Sewer."

I also liked how the story depicted honor as such a rare commodity that the mouse hero character has to learn about it from reading a book. Moreover, books are seen by the cowering mice as something to eat. They don't understand why he would read it, an act for which he is banished to the dungeon. Now that's truth-telling.

But this didn't make up for the fact that appropriating classical themes and shitting all over them is also very postmodern, and this movie was one of the clearest examples of that I have seen in many moons.

In the classical paradigm, the code of honor of a gentleman is defined not so much by what a man will do, but by what he is unwilling to do (i.e. how he will limit his power). In the postmodern, however, the idea of "honor" is stripped down to mean "acting in an overtly chivalrous manner." This becomes interpreted as "being recklessly brave in the face of any danger." This is something the degraded contemporary mind understands, since we still need to brainwash the masses to be cannon fodder for our fascist wars of conquest. Honor is thus reduced to the single command: chaaaaaaarge!

Along those lines, the most telling scene of this movie involves a magical character. The fact that there is even a magical character at all in this movie is more than a little puzzling, since the rest of the whimsical world of the movie is entirely naturalistic, despite the fact that the animals (or at least some of them) can talk to humans. But in contemporary "faith based" cinema, we have been trained to accept the arbitrary inclusion of magic whenever the movie makers want to toss it in. In this case, the gratuitously magical character is a man made out of animated vegetables. He springs to life in the private kitchen of the king's chef, whenever the chef needs cooking advice. At first I thought it worked, because it could be played as a figment of the chef's imagination.

But in the critical scene I'm talking about, the magical vegetable man (who of course speaks with a French accent), is convinced by the aforementioned mouse to save a princess held in a dungeon. Monsieur Vegetable runs out of the kitchen into the dungeon yelling "honor! honor!" with an over-aspirated French 'h' at the beginning of the word. But when he gets to the dungeon, he stumbles and collapses into a big salad-like heap. We never hear from him again. That pretty much sums up the entire movie to me: a pile of rotting garbage masquerading as something meaningful.

I would label this movie as my Disappointment of the Year, but Miracle at St. Anna is just too wretched to have any rivals for that prize.

One more note: what the hell is it with rodents in kitchens falling into soup? Was last year's abysmal Ratatouille from Disney not enough? I guess Universal thought it was such a cute concept that they had to duplicate it? Barf!