The Problem With The Tale of Despereaux

I just finished watching The Tale of Despereaux and while I find the movie visually engaging and the "mice are cowardly" theme cute (even if it does become hackneyed over the course of the film), I just cannot get over the way "Ratworld" was introduced. As in many books and films, rats in The Tale of Despereaux are depraved and vicious creatures. As if to heighten these characteristics, when the film first displays the squalid Ratworld, it does so over a score of African drum beats and Arabic melodies. The blatant racism behind the fact that this music is meant to invoke a sense of barbarism and savagery is atrocious and detestable. Exactly what message is this movie sending to its child audience? And for those who believe that deconstructing the music of an animated film is ridiculous and that I am merely going "PC crazy," I have two things to say. Firstly, I HATE the term and the entire concept of "politcal correctness" because it does not eradicate or solve anything - it merely asks a racist/misogynist/bigot to cloak their views. For instance, if a racist wants to refer to a Black person as a "nigg--" but says "African-American" to uphold "political correctness," said racist is still calling the Black person a "nigg--" in his/her mind and still has the same views. Secondly, nothing in film is an accident and so the responsible thing to do when presented with a situation such as the one in the Ratworld scene is to question why did the composer/director choose to use African and Arabic musical tones to introduce a world that is meant to represent debasement, primitivism and vulgarity? What implications does this choice have? And why, in this day and age, is the concept of the primitive other one that is still very much alive?