The last book and movie that I decided to read, watch, and compare was The Tale of Despereaux. The book was written by Kate DiCamillo and illustrated by Timothy Basil Erving in 2003 and won a Newbery Medal in 2004. An animated film based on the book was created in 2008. First of all: have we not yet exhausted the topic of mice/rats that can talk and live like people? I mean really, we've had The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary (my teacher read that to us in 3rd grade), the mice in the Disney version of Cinderella, Ratatouille, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien, Templeton from Charlotte's Web, and Stuart Little. When I saw that The Tale of Despereaux was another book about mice and rats I was not looking forward to reading it, however, I was pleasantly surprised that I liked the story. The gist of the book is about a mouse, Despereaux, who is unlike other mice in that he likes to listen to music and read, and he is much smaller with much larger ears than the others. He falls in love with the Princess Pea, whose castle he lives in, when he hears her father singing to her. Roscuro, a rat in the castle is an odd rat who likes light rather than dark. His attraction to light causes him to fall in the queen's soup and kill her. Roscure decides to kidnap the princess, along with the help of a castle servant named Miggery Sow who wants to be the princess so Despereaux must save the princess from this fate. The plot is much more complicated than that and I've left out lots of the characters and story, so you'll just have to read it for yourself. The book is a very good read, though.
On the other hand, the movie is a different story. I was pretty bored when I watched it. Like most book to movie adaptations, this one had too many variations from the book. I thought book had a perfectly fine story, I just don't understand why they had to change it. I also thought that the movie left out some of the main parts of the story. The characters had different personalities than the ones in the book. The movie makers tried too hard to make it a happily ever after story when the book had a perfectly good ending, even if it wasn't a cookie cutter happy ending. My recommendation: read the book, don't waste your time on the movie.
Side note: It just happened to be a coincidence that I picked two books written by Kate DiCamillo; I chose The Tale of Despereaux and Because of Winn Dixie based on recommendations from friends, not even noticing they were written by the same person until I had already read them. I find it pretty impressive, though, that she has written two popular, very different, Newbery winning books that were also turned into films.
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