Ratatouille (2007)
Directed by Brad Bird
In one of Paris's finest restaurants, Remy, a determined young rat, dreams of becoming a renowned French chef. Torn between his family's wishes and his true calling, Remy and his pal Linguini set in motion a hilarious chain of events that turns the City of Lights upside down.
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24 films that influenced Ratatouille
What critics say influenced Ratatouille
And just when you think Bird has exhausted his recipe book, he pulls off a slapstick climax that combines the sustained restaurant mayhem from Jacques Tati’s Playtimewith an episode of involuntary memory borrowed from Proust.
Like Robert Lawson's gradeschool best seller Ben and Me, in which a resourceful colonial mouse helps Founding Father Ben Franklin with his inventions, Ratatouille is a tale of interspecies friendship and inspiration.
"Ratatouille" may just be the most fully expressed animated family movie to come around since "101 Dalmatians" (1961).
How dreary would life be without the animated gifts of the Walt Disney Studios: "Fantasia," "Lady and the Tramp," "Cinderella," "Snow White," "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King" and dozens more that have enchanted moviegoers for decades.
(Watch for one clear visual nod of acknowledgement to Don Bluth’s The Secret of NIMH .)
From Cinderella to An American Tail , we’ve seen a lot of rodents on the big screen.
Anton Ego, a critic who looks like he runs a funeral parlor for all the dreams he’s murdered, is an Addams Family version of Ellsworth Toohey from Rand’s “The Fountainhead;” when Linguini kisses his colleague Colette, she is so blown away that she drops her can of Mace, which seems like a parody of the famous date rape encounter in “The Fountainhead;” Colette calls false modesty just another way to lie (Rand, in “Atlas Shrugged”: “This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another, the tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one’s own greatnessâ€Â); and there is a lone-wolf twist to the Disney lost-child formula.
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Initially it takes time for man and rat to get coordinated, thus leading to the kind of missteps suffered by Steve Martin when his body is occupied by Lily Tomlin’s ghost in the comedy “All of Me.”
Remember when Steve Martin was possessed by Lily Tomlin’s ghost in All of Me ?
The beauty of “Ratatouille” is more notional than the anthropomorphic homilies spun by the movie’s Disney forebears (“Song of the South” anyone?), and Bird has disguised his themes under a fantastic demi-glaze of computer animation.
Subsequent Pixar features have all been hits--"A Bug's Life" (1998), "Toy Story 2" (1999), "Monsters, Inc." (2001), "Finding Nemo" (2003), "The Incredibles" (2004), "Cars" (2006), "Ratatouille" (2007), "WALL-E" (2008), and "Up" (2009)--but it was "Toy Story" that opened the door.
Pictures like Finding Nemo and Toy Story could be easily understood by the under-6 crowd.
Enter the world of Pixar Animation, and we take that Disney magic to the next level with "A Bug's Life," "Toy Story," "Monsters, Inc." "Finding Nemo" and "The Incredibles."
Reaching the standard they set with Toy Story , Pixar has never stopped churning out the highest quality CGI you’ll ever see onscreen, unsurpassed by any of their competition.
More leisurely and less pop than the wonderful "Toy Story" movies, "Ratatouille" may look and feel kind of French, but its message of self-realization against all odds couldn't be more American.
There are so many reasons why Oscar-winning Pixar (Toy Story, Cars) has become the gold standard for CGI animation and why pretenders to the throne fail so miserably.
Ratatouille is good, but it’s easily Pixar’s weakest film since A Bug’s Life.
The film's visuals are so marvelous that they evoke the depth and lush colors of "An American in Paris."
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And the movie is basically a romantic comedy in the mold of Steve Martin’s “Roxanne,” itself a modern translation of the “Cyrano” formula.
Not since “Babette’s Feast” has a movie cared so deeply about food.
With a clever chase sequence along the banks of the Seine River, with kitchen scenes as cinematic (and hunger-inducing) as anything in the live-action gastronomic hits Babette's Feast and Big Night, with a script that plays to both kids and adults without pandering to either, Ratatouille is simply grand.
Ratatouille is the delicacy you’ve been waiting for on par with expert cooking movies such as Like Water for Chocolate or Babette’s Feast .