By Su-Kim Lee
It is a little-known fact that RATATOUILLE is a companion piece to WILLARD and BEN, designed to highlight the idea that rats are not simply mindless, flesh-eating creatures, easily controlled by a nerdy Goth boy with a bad bowl cut; rather they are intelligent creatures, fully capable of turning the tables within the human realm — with hilarious results!*
As everyone by now knows, RATATOUILLE is the story of a rat (Remy, voiced by Patton Oswalt) who befriends a kitchen garbage boy (Alfredo Linguini, voiced by Lou Romano) in the heart of Paris’ restaurant district, and accidentally rekindles the public’s love of Gusteau’s, a one-time Michelin Guide five-star rated restaurant. Along the way, we encounter the megalomaniacal Chef Skinner (Ian Holm), “the only chick in the kitchen,” Colette (Janeane Garofalo), Remy’s father (Brian Dennehy), a sepulchral restaurant critic (Anton Ego, voiced by Peter O'Toole) and the ghost of Gusteau himself (Brad Garrett).
With the incredible glut of anthropomorphized animals on screen within the last 18 months, it seems unlikely that one of the most hated and reviled creatures on the face of the planet could possibly win the hearts and minds of the public, yet it succeeds fantastically — all without being cute and/or cuddly.
When director Brad Bird (THE INCREDIBLES) inherited the project from original creator Jan Pinkava (Pixar’s GERI’S GAME), he made incredibly un-Disney-like changes. The story became a real STORY. Dumbing-down for the kiddies was entirely eliminated. He killed off Chef Gusteau — turning him into a figment of Remy’s imagination. And, the cute, make-believe rats were turned back into real rats. In interviews, Bird revealed that original conceptions for the rats had all of them on two legs, with shortened tails and people-like features. In the movie, which you’ve probably already seen with your kids, the rats are almost completely rattish … all the way down to their skin-crawling, skittering nature and horrid pink and slightly scaly tails.
I feel bad for Pinkava (who left Pixar when the project was taken from him), but Mr. Bird turned RATATOUILLE into what may well be Pixar’s best film ever.
Pixar constantly sets the bar higher and higher with each movie, but this time they have created an absolute beauty with something that is not only an animator’s wet dream, but a fabulously fleshed-out movie as well. Unlike other feature-length cartoon
s, this one has an actual story — about four story arcs — realistic characters that you care about, and, most importantly, no annoyingly distracting Randy Newman songs!!!
The much-courted and cajoled Peter O’Toole is breath-stoppingly wonderful as the seemingly-evil restaurant critic, and Ian Holm is fabulous as Chef Skinner because he is an actor in the unique position of having portrayed Napoleon multiple times, and can therefore appreciate the power of a funny French accent (“That’s what I like, little things hitting each other!”**).
Brad Bird deserves an Oscar for turning something seemingly unfilmable into an absolute beauty. But, then again, that seems to be the mantra whenever a Pixar movie approaches. “How can you make a movie about talking dolls?”; “How can you make a movie about talking fish?”; “How can you make a movie about talking cars?”; “How can you make a movie about (insert an inanimate object here)?”
John Lasseter and Pixar proved themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt with LUXO JR. all those years ago, and they deserve our trust, loyalty and belief that whimsy and logic can and do exist within the same strange sphere.
* I really hope no one took this paragraph seriously.
** Terry Gilliam’s TIME BANDITS