While far from perfect, The Tale of Despereaux is a delightful little tale that looks fantastic with some of the best computer animation I’ve ever seen done by a company not called Pixar. It’s certainly a cut above Delgo from a few weeks ago, but people wouldn’t have to work very hard to improve upon one of the most unengaging animated films I’ve ever seen. But to focus on the positive, Tales is a typical talking animal adventure that seeks to teach the younger viewers the value of the knight’s code of honesty, integrity, honour and justice. And a little mouse shows them the way.

Based on the book by Kate DiCamillo (although from what I understand, there’s a great degree of deviation), the story is about two creatures banished to the castle dungeon. Roscuro (Dustin Hoffman) is a seafaring rat that runs afoul of the royal family when he accidentally falls into the Queen’s soup and kills her out of fright. Despereaux (Matthew Broderick), meanwhile, is a young mouse that won’t act scared or scurry in the face of danger and draws cats on his school notebook. But Despereaux’s greatest crime was in reading a book about knights and then talking to the human princess of the castle (Emma Watson). When they meet up, Despereaux teaches Roscuro about being a knight and a gentlemen and how to begin to make amends for the trouble he’s wrought on the kingdom.

From what I understand, in this version Roscuro is more unintentionally evil than he is in the book. In the film, the bad stuff he does is motivated by spite and rejection, not entirely foreign emotional states for doing bad things, leaving the story open for redemption. But then again Roscuro turns out to be the only decent rat out of the whole mutilating, cannibalizing horde, which makes him as much a weirdo as Despereaux is to the other mice. Speaking of which, much of the film’s humour is mined from the fact that Despereaux, for a mouse, is clearly a deviant with his tempting of mouse traps to collect the cheese and his apparent ignorance or indifference towards cats and knives.

And then there’s all the stuff that doesn’t make sense; like the subplot about a castle servant that was once a farm labourer and then traded like a slave to work for the princess. She dreams of being a princess herself, but it turns out she’s the long, lost daughter of the dungeon guard, who gave her up to the enslaving farmer for a never-revealed reason. And then there’s the Royal Chef’s vegetable man sidekick, who appears like a genie made of fresh produce to advice on soup recipes, even if it means brawling with the chef. At first you think it’s a manifestation of the Chef’s culinary subconscious and it’s kind of funny, but then Despereaux is taking off with him, running headlong into battle with the rats, and your wondering, “What the…?”

But at least the kids seemed to love it, and who knows, maybe the book makes better sense of all these desperate elements; I’ll have to but it on my reading list, I guess. For my part, I just sat back and appreciated the art of the film, which was finely detailed like a proper painting in a children’s book. The animation is lush and golden, as every frame feels warm and alive with an exaggerated cartoon look but with a hint of photorealistic features. The artistry is amazing, even if the script comes off sounding like something coming off the lips of the Randy Beaman Kid from Animaniacs. Yeah, it’s one of those movies, but like I said, the kids will love it, and maybe their parents will too.