Link to the thread on Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), which was also based on a Kate DiCamillo book.



I am liking this trailer, which I saw before The Express last night. No DreamWorks-y pop-culture references. It seems a bit like a copy of Ratatouille (2007), but it's based on a Newberry-winning book, so how derivative can it be? I'm hoping this could be the first movie I'd feel safe taking the twins to since WALL*E. My only concern is that it seems to be about conquering fear, on some level, and that might mean putting, well, fear-inducing things on the screen. Hmmm.

In other news, I picked up Sleeping Beauty (1959) on Blu-Ray yesterday and am wondering if my kids are ready for a movie about slaying dragons.

PTC wrote:

You know your own children, of course, but wasn't this movie considered to include one of the more frightening sequences in Disney animation--at least, when it originally debuted? I have no idea how modern audiences/children would respond.

READ THE BOOK BEFORE YOU SEE THE MOVIE.

It'll take you very little time.

The movie very clearly embellishes and expands in ways that made Croaker and I, both huge fans of the book, greatly dismayed. Hopefully the movie will surprise us.

But just as many of us said we're glad we read the Narnia books and The Hobbit before a film arrived, so I suspect that those who read this book will be glad they did so before seeing a film adaptation.

BethR wrote:
: You know your own children, of course, but wasn't this movie considered to include one of the more frightening sequences in Disney animation--at least, when it originally debuted? I have no idea how modern audiences/children would respond.

Oh, yeah, it scared me when I was a kid, too. But that was in the theatre. In a living room, with the lights on, it might not be so overpowering. I dunno.

Overstreet wrote:
: READ THE BOOK BEFORE YOU SEE THE MOVIE.

I put a hold on it at the library immediately after starting this thread.

Hey Jeff, does this alleviate your concerns any? I finished reading the book a few days ago, and this new trailer seems to indicate that the bulk of the story is all there:



Obviously, it has been expanded to fill the feature-length running time. And I am curious to see if they have restructured the story, and if so how, considering that the book is broken up into segments, some of which begin days or weeks or months before the previous segments. (It could be Prince Caspian syndrome all over again!) But there is very little in this trailer that I don't recognize.

My wife and I saw this today, and while I have still not read the book-- I'm going to try to do so tomorrow, before I interview the screenwriter on Monday-- my wife is a big fan of it, and she says the film doesn't particularly embellish or omit details from the book, but it DOES change the order in which things happen in such a way that there is a bit less mystery and suspense regarding certain characters and events, as their origins are explained in the proper chronological order rather than through flashback.

Also, there is apparently one character invented for the film that is not in the book, but it's a minor one, and fits the spirit of the story so well that I was really rather surprised to hear that he wasn't part of the original tale.

As for Peter's concern about taking kids, the movie IS about overcoming fear, but, more specifically, it's about MICE overcoming their fear. So unless your kids are frightened of mousetraps or kittens, they should be fine.

Sounds good. Restructuring the story makes sense, for a feature film. Though if they had produced this for TV, keeping the original structure would have worked very well -- they could have jumped back in time after each commercial break!

I would have seen the film this morning, but I've got to watch after the kids -- all three of 'em -- while the wife is at some church function. So we're all going to see the movie when it opens instead. It'll be the first movie that all five of us have seen as a family.

Um, has she read the book recently?

My wife and I love the book, and we sat slack-jawed in amazement at how much it has been embellished. How beloved characters have been needlessly dropped, and others unnecessarily revised, and others -- that one you mentioned in particular -- have been introduced for... what reason?

If I hadn't read the book, I would have praised this as the strangest and most audacious family film since Babe: Pig in the City.

But because I have read the book, which is a masterpiece of simplicity and grace, I am boggled by this movie. I mean, there are a lot of wonderful, wonderful things in the movie. Some are from the book, some are brilliant inventions just for the film. But the film ends up complicating the original story so much that it diminishes the power of Despereaux's central storyline and makes this much more "The Tale of Roscuro and Despereaux."

And then there's that line at the end... the line that breaks the film's fragile grasp on truth... by attributing all of the good things that happen to GOOD LUCK?! I just felt the air go spluttering out of the burst balloon.

So... yes, go see it. There are some truly wonderful things in this film. And it does bring *parts* of the story to life with heart and imagination.

But I'll say it again: READ THE BOOK BEFORE YOU SEE THE FILM. It's such a rare and wonderful children's story. And if you see the movie first, you will end up distracted by comparing the two in your head while you watch. And you will lose that rarest of experiences... the discovery of a wonderful story on the page without any expectations or preconceived notions about what it's about, or what will happen.

And the Despereaux in the movie is NOT the Despereaux of the book. Watching this film, audiences will see an imposter, and not the real Despereaux at all.

I at least agree with you as far as *that* line goes... I was completely dumbstruck by it, and frustrated. Until that point, I was spellbound by the movie, but that line almost sunk the whole picture for me.

A few minor differences:

Despereaux's mother - a completely different character. Antoinette is not a timid, cowering character. She is very French, she talks back to her husband, she considers Despereaux "such the disappointment" -- a line that DiCamillo uses in wonderful ways, but which is completely absent from the film.
Furlough - His signature exclamation -- "Cripes!!" -- he never says it once in the film, that I noticed.
Roscuro - His story is revised in rather startling ways.

And then, well... just about everything that happens in the last 45 minutes of the movie is not in the book.

Don't get me wrong, Josh... the movie *is* spellbinding.

But it is also just about as thorough a revision of the story as Cuaron's Children of Men was from P.D. James book.

I'll be interested to see if anybody else keeps thinking about Antz while watching this film. There are some interesting points of connection, I think.

There are also some startling points of similarity with Ratatouille... but remember, this book came long before Ratatouille. Despereaux got involved in soup-making long before Remy found himself in the kitchen.

Ah, but the character design of the villain, Botticelli... THAT wasn't prescribed by the book. So is that an unfortunate coincidence, that he's modeled after the same creepy icons as Anton Ego?

If anyone has any questions for Gary Ross, the producer/screenwriter, I'm interviewing him later this afternoon, and am happy to take suggestions!

I'm very, very interested in the origins of the character called "The Soup Genie." He wasn't in the book. The Kingdom of Dor was not, in DiCamillo's book, a kingdom of magical spells or genies. So, for a bunch of vegetables to suddenly leap up and become a talking character... and eventually a friend and fellow adventurer for Despereaux, is about as far from the world of the book as you can get. Who invented this character?

Also, was DiCamillo involved in the adaptation at all, and did she have any kind of approval of the final script?

Spellbinding? Maybe for a few minutes, early on, although having taken your advice and having dived into the first 50 pages of the book, I was a little jarred that the movie begins with the story of the rat, not Desperaux – I haven’t even reached that point in the novel.

I trust the adaptation of that storyline is intact, but what threw me off was how the movie set up parallels between Ruscuro’s life – he has a special, un-rat-like talent – and Despereaux, who has a special, un-mouse-like talent, before taking one of the two in a darker direction. The motivations weren’t clear to me, nor were the distinctions between the STORYBOOK story of the princess that Despereaux was reading, and the actual princess in the main tale.

There’s a theme in the early part of the book about music and the king, and although we see some of that in the movie, I’m not sure those elements of the story were well explained or elaborated on. In fact, now that I think about it, Desperaux’s TALENT in the book has to do with an appreciation of music, whereas the movie paints him as a chivalrous throwback, with big ears. The ears are in the book, as is the chivalry (in the early going, which is as far as I’ve gotten), but isn’t Desperaux’s love of music the POINT of his having large ears? Not only does he LOOK different, but he uses that difference (large ears) in a unique way. Did you feel like the movie made this point? Is it a point that isn’t really in the book, or one that I’ve misunderstood, not having read the whole book?

The separate story threads in the movie did eventually settle, but then came together in a way that felt hurried to me. I left a little dissatisfied. Some of that feeling may have been self-inflicted; maybe I missed some obvious stuff (I often do). I didn’t dislike the movie, but thought it faltered as it went along, and ended with a whimper.

Intact? As an adaptation, this movie shocking in its unnecessary revisions. I love the animation. I like the voice work. I enjoyed the movie... but only so long as I didn't think about what they had done to a beautiful, delicate, classic story.

This is NOT The Tale of Despereaux.



YES. And why did they wipe out that aspect of the story?

Why was the Antoinette of the book erased and replaced with a forgettable, uninteresting imposter?

What happened to the Furlough of the novel, who always shouted "Cripes!"? They took away his signature line!

And what what the samhell is a Soup Genie and why is he in the Kingdom of Dor... which is *not* a magical kingdom of spirits and spells?

Ah, the soup genie -- that was the chef. I was wondering if that character was going to surface later in the book. You're telling me he doesn't? His presence is superfluous to the main story(ies), so why was he added? I smell a lot of aping of Ratatouille, for no apparent reason.

Oh yeah: As we left the screening, one of my daughters declared the movie "just OK." She's 6 years old!

Overstreet wrote:
: Christian wrote:

: : I trust the adaptation of that storyline is intact . . .
:
: Intact? As an adaptation, this movie shocking in its unnecessary revisions.

But is that particular storyline not intact? What Christian describes sounds more or less like that section of the book, as I remember it. Doesn't the book draw a contrast between how the mouse and the rat overcome their adversity, one in a healthy way and the other in a not-so-healthy way?

I agree that the Soup Genie (so that's the entity's name, eh?) looks really weird. I haven't seen the film yet, but seeing him in the trailer was very jarring.

No, his storyline is not intact. It's similar, but wraps up rather differently.

No... unless there's something I've forgotten, there's no soup genie in the book at all.

Ah, okay.

Love your new avatar, BTW. (Or, hmmm, can it really be an "avatar" if it is an actual picture of the actual person's face?)

Yes, it's an avatar. (sheesh) Kind of like how Obama wore an Obama mask on SNL. It was still a mask.

Alan Thomas wrote:
: Yes, it's an avatar. (sheesh)

Well, I was thinking back to the Hindu origins of that word ("usually implies a deliberate descent from higher spiritual realms to lower realms of existence for special purposes", where the deity can assume multiple external forms without any one of them being THE true form of the deity, per se).

The Obama-wearing-an-Obama-mask analogy takes this discussion into trippier territory, though. I mean, are not all faces masks? Are not all masks faces? And now I have the urge to play DA's Doppelgänger album, and gaze at its cover art.

I don't know many people who could say this:

<< stifling a sarcastic comment about... and another... and another... >>

Jeffrey, to answer one of your questions, Kate was evidently involved with the writing of the script at every stage, even writing the first treatment, and she was actually the one to suggest a few of the changes that were made. According to screenwriter Gary Ross, anyway, she not only signed off on the final draft, but really loves how the movie turned out.

That was his story, anyway. I also asked him about a few of the specific changes that were made, and his answers were actually really interesting. I think the interview is posting at CT tomorrow or Thursday.

That's really, really interesting.

I wonder why she robbed some of her best characters of their distinct voices and amusing idiosyncrasies.

Whatever the case, I *do* like the movie a lot. I just hope that somehow, someday, I see a simpler, gentler, graceful adaptation of the book, which contains plenty of story for a movie. What's on the screen right now isn't the same story. It isn't even the same kingdom.

Ross spoke to me a bit about the differences in film and print as media, and was actually somewhat audacious in saying that some of the liberties they took with the film simply wouldn't have worked on the page-- the Soup Genie and expansion of Ratworld being two examples. And you know, I don't disagree with him, at least in principle-- those are broad, cinematic flourishes that seem to serve a motion picture better than they would a book, and I found them to be in keeping with the spirit of the story.

SDG, where are you?

I think this may explain why the film feels so schizophrenic and overcrowded to me. It feels like several different versions of the story all entangled.

Busy!


Yes. From my review (coming!):

What the heck? Who reads The Tale of Despereaux and thinks, “What this story needs is… a magical food genie”? Perhaps it was French director Sylvain Chomet, creator of the bizarre The Triplets of Belleville, who began work on Despereaux before being kicked off the project. Or possibly Corpse Bride co-director Mike Johnson, who replaced Chomet for awhile. Certainly such a surreal creature would be more at home in Triplets or Corpse Bride than Despereaux.

At any rate, it’s harder to imagine this conceit coming from writer–producer Gary Ross (Seabiscuit) or from the final directing team of Sam Fell (Flushed Away) and Robert Stevenhagen (Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, The Road to El Dorado).

Too many cooks in the soup? Perhaps. DiMillo fans may be frustrated by Despereaux’s unevenness and sometimes odd storytelling choices. Even so, the strange and wonderful quality of DiMillo’s story is honored, if imperfectly.

I am currently (not right this moment, of course) reading The Tale of Despereaux aloud to a contiguous subset of three of my children (thinking of you, Matt Page! ).

P.S. Jeff, I see from that article I was right in pegging Chomet as the creator of the soup genie (or golem, as I originally called him, or Soup Spirit, as this article calls him).

Uh oh.

Steven, I swear that I turned this in before I read the excerpt from your review:



And I also used a "too many cooks in the Dorian kitchen.

But you called her DiMillo. It's DiCamillo.

Perhaps you were thinking of Cecil B. DiMill-o?

Um. Wow.


Um. Yeah, maybe.

I started into the book, then stopped at chapter 9 and began reading it to my kids. But then I had to see the movie (took them along), and then had to return the book to the library! Naomi is looking forward to hearing me read it again. I'm number 5 in the holds queue.

So ... is the soup genie the guy made of vegetables, or the chef who tastes the soup? I'm SO confused!

Question...

Why is there a dragon on the poster?

Even Despereaux himself has been significantly revised. To quote again from my review:

The book’s protagonist is precisely an unlikely hero: weak, sickly, less timid than other mice, but still quite capable of fear, and even prone to fainting.

By contrast, the movie Despereaux is a natural hero of the Hollywood sort: one who never feels fear, and whose speed, grace and reflexes would do him credit at the Jade Palace in Kung Fu Panda. Unlike DiCamillo’s hero, who is well aware of his shortcomings, the movie mouse not only doesn’t know he’s small, he thinks of himself as a giant. Even his portentous birth in the movie contrasts with his unpromising beginnings in the book.

Yes on all counts.




Good question.

Aha! Isn't there a dragon in one of the Brave Knight Sequences, those wonderfully animated fantasy visions that Despereaux has while he's reading?

Overstreet wrote:
: Perhaps you were thinking of Cecil B. DiMill-o?

Ha!

: Aha! Isn't there a dragon in one of the Brave Knight Sequences, those wonderfully animated fantasy visions that Despereaux has while he's reading?

That was going to be my guess before you answered your question. Dragons may or may not exist in the world of the film (I haven't seen the film yet), but they would presumably exist in the stories that Despereaux has been reading -- and his real-life mission is very much an outgrowth of his love of those stories.

Huh? You like the movie? Guess I'll have to read your review.

I find myself thinking of how you've blasted the Narnia adpatations and most of the Walden adaptations of other kids' books. But now, "Even so, the strange and wonderful quality of DiMillo’s story is honored, if imperfectly."

That's a sentence I would have applied to some of other movies you tore to pieces. As for THIS movie, I haven't read all of the book, so can't comment.

Well, FWIW, both Narnia films to date have gotten B-pluses from me. I found that Prince Caspian "manages to improve on Lewis’s plot without violating its spirit," and judged that LW&W "follows the basic plot and structure of the book, and its most important themes — guilt and expiation, sacrifice and redemption, death and resurrection, the triumph of good over evil — are preserved." So, "tore to pieces" is a relative term.

And many of my criticisms of the Narnia films as adaptations are echoed in my review of The Tale of Despereaux, though not as violently. I can't deny that know and love Narnia a lot better than I know and love The Tale of Despereaux, so it's possible I've been more forgiving on the latter as adaptation.

Well, there are two key questions:

Is it a good adaptation? I'd say of Despereaux, without hestitation, "No."

If it's unfaithful to the text -- if it's a reimagining, a reinvention, a drastically embellished version -- then is that New Thing they've made worth seeing? Is this new thing, aside from assessments of fidelity, remarkable in any way? I would say of Despereaux, without hesitation, "Yes."

Children of Men: It strayed so far from the text, you can hardly consider it an "adaptation." But I love what it *is.*

Prince Caspian: A failure as an adaptation. And what it *is* is pretty unremarkable, IMHO. Same for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Both films introduce problems that were not present in the text, and to some extent misunderstand and misinterpret the source material. And as big screen fantasies, they have a few remarkable moments, but I was never fully drawn in or engaged.

Yes, my earlier post was getting at the film as adaptation, but as for what the film is, I suspect you guys are far more forgiving of the film, which I found decent but overcrowded with characters, themes, and plot strands that didn't cohere into the satisfying experience that I think you guys found it to be.

Now, I liked Stardust last year, which suffered from some of the very same problems, so I make no claim to consistency.

Fwiw, my interview with Ross.

Question about this line in the movie from the narrator:

“What happens when you make something illegal that is just part of the natural world?”

Did that bother any of you who saw the movie? Did you think it was a comment on something beyond what was on screen (where it refers to rats -- what they are, not what they do). I made some connections that the film's target audience is probably too young to make, but I'm wondering if those connections were intentionally hinted at, or if my mind just raced to certain suspicions.

There was also the line: "What happens when your name is considered a bad word?" (Or something like that. Can't remember exactly.)

The film did make stronger political insinuations than the book did.

Yes. A minor annoyance for the adult viewer, not something I see as a problem though.

Visuals: Stunning details and sweeping beauty.
Casting/Voice: Stellar, clever and seamless
Narrative: Uneven
Theme: A Golden Corral of too many ideas ineffectively raised

A disappointment for the wife and I as we love Dicamillo.

The soup spirit? I was okay with this addition as a manifestation of the chef's internal struggle with his artistry, but when it charged down the castle hallway with Desp. on his shoulder.... blech!

There were a number of moments where the film looked like it was going to do something politcially motivated, and the Sigourney voiceover got preachy on more than one occasion. But before I could figure out what they were trying to say, there was another ill-conceived chase scene or a watered down version of the hardships Desperaux faces in the book. So I became distracted from the thematic deficits by the narrative inadequacies.

I almost wrote something about this a week ago -- in fact, I DID write something -- but then my computer crashed, and I wasn't in the mood to start all over again.

Suffice it to say that this was the first movie that my entire family of five went to together (and with my parents / the kids' grandparents, no less!), and I don't mind that this particular film can lay claim to that milestone. Though I thought it was interesting how my daughter's biggest reactions, during our trip to the theatre, were not to anything in this movie, but to the Ice Age trailer that played before it, and to the giant Mighty Mouse sculpture hanging from the ceiling in the lobby.

Anyway.

As for the movie itself, the Soup Genie didn't really add anything to the story, and felt about as superfluous as it was.

I was also disappointed to see how uneven the film was in its efforts to tell the story more chronologically: some bits in the past are relegated to flashbacks, but other things are told in sequential order, so that this movie, despite being called "A Tale of DESPEREAUX", begins and ends with an entirely DIFFERENT character instead (i.e. the rat, and it gives him an origin that I believe is completely different from the one in the book; in the book, I believe there is a parallel of sorts between the Mouse and the Rat, both of whom are drawn to Something, and then suffer a major setback, but whereas the Mouse bounces back well, the Rat does not; if I am remembering it correctly, the parallel in the book gives the reader a sort of fork-in-the-road choice between two different ways to respond to the setbacks in our lives, but the movie, alas, by changing the Rat's story as much as it does, almost completely removes any sort of parallelism).

On the other hand, there were some fun visuals. And I really, really loved that simple, mournful tune the king plays on his guitar (or whatever particular stringed instrument that was).

So, not a bad film, but not a great one, either.