The greatest movie experiences are those that pull you right into the world of the movie, transporting you to somewhere new and different, involving you thoroughly in that world. You walk away made somehow better for the experience. Ratatouille is just such a movie.
The very concept of the movie is so off center from our world that it is bound to collapse horribly if not executed perfectly. It's about a rat that wants to be a chef. In Paris. Obviously we tend to consider a rat in the kitchen to be a very bad thing so the notion of letting one in deliberately and then allowing said rat to make dinner will have most people feeling a bit queasy. The genius of writer/director Brad Bird is that he makes his hero, Remy, not only acceptable but someone we begin to hope desperately can succeed in his dream.
Achieving excellence is clearly something that Bird not only aspires to but preaches to his viewers. His last movie, The Incredibles was a story about rising above mediocrity. Ratatouille is an even more thoughtful take on that idea. Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) is a rat. He belongs to a colony that steals and stores anything that even vaguely resembles food. Quality is eschewed in favor of quantity. Remy is no ordinary rat though. He is blessed with a magnificent sense of smell that gives him a very detailed view of the world and just how tasty it might be. To his father Django (voiced by Brian Dennehy) that skill is useful only for detecting rat poison. Remy has better ideas. He sneaks into a house searching for the good stuff by which to eat better. He stumbles across a TV show featuring the great chef Gousteau (voiced by Brad Garrett), who insists that anyone can cook, a concept strongly at odds with the snobbish Paris food culture. To Remy though, it is a revelation and it pushes him to learn to cook.
He pushes his luck though and raises the ire of the elderly woman whose house he raids for food. Her wrath has the side effect of evicting the entire colony and separating Remy from it. He soon finds himself in Paris itself, led by the ghost of Gousteau to the chef's old restaurant. After the passing of the great chef the restaurant has grown stale and fallen on hard times. Remy accidentally falls into the kitchen and attempts to escape but ends up tinkering with the soup, where he is discovered by the garbage boy Linguini. The two strike and unlikely alliance, combining Remy's cooking skill with Linguini's ability to not be a rat. With Remy somewhat literally pulling the strings, Linguini rockets into the limelight as a hot new chef.
Remy is a masterfully created character. He is the starving artist who will take wild chances to realize his dreams, no matter how unlikely. For a rat, he's pretty cute but don't mistake that for an easy going personality. He bullies his brother and Linguini in the course of his dreaming and is not above breaking his father's heart. Given the opportunity he can be vengeful or Machiavellian in his scheming. But through all of this, Remy is so devoted to his passion for cooking that it is easy to forgive his prickly side. For Remy, food is not just about eating but transporting someone through the experience of eating. The way that the animators make food come alive as an experience is clever and energizing.
Speaking of the animation, Pixar makes a point of conquering some new element of the world with each passing film. Finding Nemo made for convincing water and fish. Cars gave us majestic landscapes and clouds of dust that looked great while nearly bringing their computers to their knees. Ratatouille gives us ultra realistic fur and food that looks so good it is nearly impossible to watch the movie without getting hungry. And as always they stress the little details that make their films work so well it almost becomes difficult to remember they are animated. The effect is so convincing that our minds accept it without question.
This movie's charms are far too many to name and to do so would only steal from the magic of witnessing it for yourself. So let me end this abruptly by simply insisting that you see it. This is a film that will stand as a landmark in not just animation but all of movies for many years to come.
- <a href="mailto:johnshea@ttnmc.com?subject=Ratatouille%20Review">John Shea</a>
Related Items:
|
