Lessons from The Tale of Despereaux

It was an absolutely DELIGHTFUL story. Charming, evocative, mysterious, fun, and cheerful for the most part. One of those stories that is just made for reading aloud, and which keeps the audience enthralled to the last word, and which provides a simultaneous sense of satisfaction mixed with disappointment when it ends. We read it together as a family, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, it is high on my list of Must Read books for children – oh, not very YOUNG children, because the story is too long for them, and requires connecting the dots between several story lines woven skillfully together. But 10 to 18 year olds – yes, even teens love this story. A lovely way to create bonds of shared memories for families with teens that they aren’t sure how to connect with again.

But the story itself is not what provided the lesson. It was the movie. We bought it, in hopes that it would capture some of the essence of the story. To our great disappointment, it failed in every respect. Other than the name, and a few shared names of characters, and the mention of soup, the movie bore no relation to the story in the book.

The creators of the movie, from some misguided notion that they had to rewrite the story to capture the movie audience, managed to strip it of every defining characteristic, and to create a story that was not only devoid of any of the charm or enjoyment that the book possessed, but completely, and utterly uninspired and pathetic. It was a waste of money to even make such a travesty. Other reviewers have agreed that the movie was on the low end of the scale. In fact, it is something that could only be appreciated by someone who had a very short attention span, no taste, and who had no previous exposure to the original story (the very young kids who appreciated the endless string of Land Before Time movies comes to mind).

It truly was not even the same story! They changed the settings, left out essential elements, threw in completely meaningless and worthless replacements, created environments in the story that had no reason for being there, and in short, utterly ruined it. I am not too harsh, in fact, there are not words available to truly describe the vandalism perpetrated by the unskilled crew who created the appalling monstrosity.

The sailing ship in the opening scene was the first clue that something catastrophic had occurred – the book does not go near the sea at all. The absence of essential character discovery, and the remake of the dungeon into something like the dark side of the rat city from Flushed Away were obvious and unpleasant changes which displayed the ignorance and amateurity of the vandals who posed themselves as screen writers. The cook – a female character with personality and some humorous appeal – was replaced by a male chef who was merely a caricature, and a bad one at that. The movie was replete with illogical changes such as this, bad whims, carried out with no purpose, and with a sense of pathetic uselessness. The crowning atrocity though, was the vegetable man (an incredibly stupid creation of dancing vegetables which completely destroyed the story line without any kind of benefit whatsoever) – which had all the feel of an addition by a recent graduate artist, who had created something like it for a school project, and just HAD to use it SOMEWHERE, whether it fit or not.

This book could have been recrafted as a movie that was worthy of the excellence of the original story. But because this company purchased the rights, and made such a travesty, they not only polluted the world with so much animated refuse, they also blocked those who would do it right from doing so for some time to come. I think that is the saddest thing about it. In the afterlife for film creators, there must be a special torture chamber reserved for the perpetrators of such heinous actions – where they are first blessed with the good taste they lacked in mortality, and then forced to view bad films through eternity!

The lesson is applicable to many business concepts. Great business ideas contain an element of genius – a bit of something different, skillfully woven into the fabric of the business, which define it as something unique and attractive. It succeeds BECAUSE it is different.

Often, a thriving business will be bought out, or will go public and have other voices dictating decisions, or it may just reach a point of growth where the business owner starts to automate or delegate the wrong things to the wrong sources. In the changes, the wrong things are changed – the very things that define the uniqueness are lost, and it becomes like every other mediocre look-alike.

In the case of bringing in other decision makers, they often wish to recreate it in the image of that which is familiar, little realizing that as they do so, the very thing that made it successful is diluted or lost completely. After all, if it were like all the rest, based on familiarity, it would not have grown in the first place! It is the DIFFERENCES which define a good business. And it is those differences which uninspired or uncreative people simply cannot wrap their heads around. Genius works – but is often not appreciated by those who would like to capitalize on someone ELSE’S genius, when they do not possess it themselves.

The moral is, that in making changes to something that works, don’t lose the ESSENCE of what works. The movie of The Tale of Despereaux is but one example of the destruction of something precious, and the lowering of something effervescent to the worst of the common.

The unexpected, the twists, the uncommon brilliance is in fact, what makes it work.