The Tale of Despereaux (2008)
Directed by Robert Stevenhagen
Once upon a time... in the far away kingdom of Dor... lived a brave and virtuous mouse with comically oversized ears who dreamt of becoming a knight. Banished from his home for having such lofty ambitions, Despereaux sets off on an amazing adventure with his good-hearted rat friend Roscuro, who leads him, at long last, on a very noble quest to rescue an endangered princess and save an entire kingdom from darkness.
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What critics compared The Tale of Despereaux to
The Universal release, directed by Sam Fell (Flushed Away) and Robert Stevenhagen (animator on The Road to El Dorado) from a screenplay by writer Gary Ross (Pleasantville) adapted from the children's novel by Kate DiCamillo, certainly bears a superficial resemblance to Ratatouille, but it's a better film in several ways.
This is the second stop-motion animated feature from Laika to be made in 3D, but while one can see parallels to their earlier "Coraline," "ParaNorman," written by that film's storyboard supervisor Chris Butler and codirected by him and Sam Fell ("Flushed Away," "The Tale of Despereaux"), has a weaker story which is stretched out far enough to produce sag, ironic for a film whose every frame must be meticulously constructed.
Butler, who also penned the ParaNorman script and was a storyboard artist on Coraline, and Fell, who directed the animated flicks The Tale of Despereaux and Flushed Away, create a wonderfully quirky world here in ParaNorman that feels vibrantly melancholy with so many horror homages peppered throughout that you'll need at least a second viewing to be able to catch most of them.
(The veteran Sam Fell, of the less spooky Flushed Away and The Tale of Despereaux, is a co-director.)
The writing-directing debut of Chris Butler with co-director Sam Fell (2008's " The Tale of Despereaux "), this project, produced by LAIKA (the same studio behind 2009's " Coraline "), is filled to bursting with a passion and love for the horror genre that assures the story and characters are taken very seriously, even when the tone or the seldom ingeniously acerbic dialogue and visual cues also give it a rich, potent brand of unkiddified humor.
With Norman - voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee - screenwriter Chris Butler, an artist on "Corpse Bride" and "Coraline," and co-director Sam Fell, who directed "The Tale of Despereaux," create a character in classic outcast-superhero comic-book tradition.
It’s from an original screenplay by Chris Butler, an animator who’s also making his debut as co-director (with Sam Fell, who helmed “Flushed Away” and “The Tale of Despereaux”).