Ratatouille

Bonjour! Let’s go ahead and treat ourselves to a second helping from the kitchens of Pixar - 2007’s cooking rat tail tale, Ratatouille. The strained food metaphors will now cease.


Tonight on Hell's Kitchen...

This film tells the story of Remy, a young rat who aspires to rise above the low habits of his fellow vermin. Gifted with a fine sense of smell, he one day discovers the joys to be had in combining flavors of different foods, and decides that he was born to be a chef. After becoming separated from his family and the rest of his colony underneath the city of Paris, Remy ends up in the kitchen of Gusteau’s Restaurant, originally opened by deceased Chef Auguste Gusteau (Remy's idol.) He is soon swept up into the world of fine dining, as he and a young human named Alfredo Linguini learn to work together to achieve Remy’s dreams of cuisine. The film has a strong and unique premise, although much of its second half becomes bogged down with subplots involving a love story, a crooked head chef and a villainous restaurant critic.

That ... is absolutely fucking disgusting. Where's the lamb sauce!?

During sequences where Remy observes and practices the culinary arts, the movie soars. Ratatouille is one of the best representations on film of the high that can be experienced when one enjoys or produces true works of art. The process of discovery by which the little rat realizes that he can not only appreciate, but actually create wonderful food, feels very genuine. His continuing enthusiasm for new culinary discoveries is palpable; one actually senses the passion that great chefs (both professional and amateur) feel while working in the kitchen. The film also educates audiences on how a working kitchen operates, including the different kinds of cooks that work together to make it run like a well-oiled machine. Remy himself is a wonderfully likeable character to experience this through, with actor and comedian Patton Oswalt imbuing the lovable rat with an easy warmth. Through Oswalt’s performance, we feel not only the joys of cooking, but also the pitfalls of being a rat in a human world.

You need to communicate! Work together as a team! Donkeys!

As noted in my review of Cars, Pixar has always had a knack for selecting the perfect voice actor for each of their roles, even when their choices seem odd at first. Besides Oswalt, Ratatouille is full of familiar names delivering surprisingly suitable vocals. Ian Holm, who excels at playing short and ineffectual authority figures (and Hobbits,) seems to be having a ball playing the dastardly diminutive Chef Skinner, ranting and raving about the supposed conspiracies at work to bring down his frozen-food empire. An unrecognizable Janeane Garofalo plays chef Colette Tatou, the tough-as-nails rôtisseur who mentors Linguini. And Peter O’Toole, as the vampiric restaurant critic Anton Ego, gets to do his nastiest snobby snarl, like Boris Karloff’s animated Grinch reincarnate. The genial O’Toole clearly relishes every despicable syllable he gets to slither over, creating an amusing, though wholly unlikable character. I know it’s just a cartoon, but when Ego verbally sucker-punches Gusteau’s amiable waiter (Pixar lucky-charm John Ratzenberger,) I felt my teeth clenching; if I were running that restaurant and a critic spoke to my staff like that, he’d get the ol’ fork-in-the-eye.

Can we get security and get this knob back to his seat, yes?

Who really doesn’t do it for me, though, is the main human character, Alfredo Linguini. Played by Pixar production animator Lou Romano, the hapless garbage-boy turned restaurant-owner is a gangling, clumsy buffoon who is supposed to be haplessly likeable. However, I find the character's constant lack of physical coordination and “lovable loser” shtick wears really thin, really fast. Beyond the fact that he doesn’t kill Remy, falls for Colette, and turns out to be the long-lost son of Chef Gusteau, what’s to like about him? In all of his scenes, even after we see his apartment and witness his drunken exchanges with Chef Skinner, we never learn anything more about Linguini beyond his ineptitude. Besides his clumsiness, he has ZERO personality. I imagine he was a fun character to animate, and I hold no ill-will toward Mr. Romano for his vocalization. I also realize that his appeal is supposed to be in his physical comedy, like an animated, modern-day Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd; however those silent-film performances worked so well partly because they were silent. We therefore didn’t have to suffer through an unending stream of wordless exclamations as they fell about: “Whoah, whoah, whoah-hoaohohowhaooaahh …. Hey, wha-wooahh, I - wha-ha-heyyeyy a-whaa!” Ugh, just kill me now.

I've never, ever, ever, ever met someone I believe in as little as you.

Which brings me to another point of contention with Ratatouille: the whole gimmick of Remy controlling Linguini like a marionette is ridiculous. What the hell sort of miraculous physical abnormality would cause a human being’s entire musculature to be able to be manipulated through a few strands of hair? It’s hard enough to accept that Remy can somehow make the young man’s arms and hands move, but when we witness the rat able to make a sleeping Linguini rise and stand up, like some kind of malfunctioning Gundam suit, it throws all believability out the window. It’s a rather too convenient solution to the film’s central problem and, frankly, smells of lazy writing.
 

You useless sack of fucking yankee dankey doodle shite...

This central issue I speak of is one that everyone must dance around when discussing Ratatouille; it's why the film isn’t spoken of as often as Pixar’s other movies, and why reactions to the film vary wildly from love, to hate, to indifference. When you get right down to it, the movie’s about a rat in a kitchen. While we have Remy standing over a boiling pot of his culinary creations, or hear his voice-over narration discussing the wonders of food, the movie is sublime. But cut to long shots of him scurrying around the restaurant’s refrigerator, or worse, shots of whole swarms of rats running around a kitchen, and one’s skin instinctively begins to crawl. Make the rats as cute and anthropomorphic as you wish, there will always be certain “ick” factor involving vermin around food. While the issue of rat and human coexistence is a recurring theme in the film, it’s treated more like “story wallpaper” than a real challenge for the characters to overcome.
 

Oh my God, look at the state of this fucking place...

While critical praise for the film was near unanimous upon it’s initial release, in years since the film is usually only invoked by the general public when discussing the full Pixar canon, or when someone wants to play the “underrated” card. Director Brad Bird, who is apparently immune from criticism due to the cultish devotion around his 1999 film The Iron Giant, seems to have a habit of heading up films that are heavy with ideas and incident, but fall a bit short when trying to tie everything together (very much like 2004’s The Incredibles and his later Tomorrowland.) While the central premise and main character are a delight, I think Ratatouille could've turned out better if the filmmakers had just cut to the chase, as it's one of the few good Pixar movies that would benefit from some judicious editing. Perhaps a few less characters, or an excised subplot or two would’ve made the film a more streamlined and enjoyable affair.

Whether or not this would’ve helped to resolve the film’s gross central conceit will remain a topic of debate.

Now fuck off...