I’m sitting in a theater filled with children, parents of children, and more children. Ratatouille, outside of being cartoonish in appearance, is not really a kid’s movie, but the people at Pixar have finally figured out that kids make up a lot of their audience.
There was one major flaw in Toy Story, the psychotic kid next door that liked to use extreme interrogation methods on his toys. That whole character should have been axed, and all the scenes with the little psycho were not good for kids to see. Nor were the mounds of dead superheros in The Incredibles. Nor, really, were the all teeth fish in Finding Nemo.
Once of my chief complaints about Pixar films has been that their people suck, they don’t look like people. Pixar is a lot like Odo from Deep Space Nine, who could mimic virtually anything down to the most minute detail, but whose face looked like a bad Halloween mask. There are scenes in Ratatouille were photo-realistic glasses filled with wine are toasted, where streets are made of very real looking cobblestones, where steam and fog and water look and act like steam and fog and water. The people are all made to look like cheap Saturday morning animations. I have now come to realize that the crappy looking people must be done on purpose. Thought why this would be so is still a mystery to me.
The rats, while they do not look like rats, do look like Muppets. The fur is shockingly real looking, real looking as in it looks like the stuff they make Cookie Monster out of. Wow. The people were not all bad, either. Colette, our sappy hero’s love interest, has very nice hair and all of the human simulations have amazing eyes. But too many of the people had hair that looked as if it was drawn on with a Marks-a-lot. A fun effect, but a bit flat next to the hyper furry rats. These are still very minor gripes, the movie is amazing to behold.
There is only one questionable scene in this film, and it is so small as to pass without too much notice. Remy’s Dad takes out to show him how the ‘real world’ treats rats. Wouldn’t be a Pixar movie without a bunch of the hero’s people dead, would it? So we see an exterminator’s display window with rows of dead rats lined up like Spartacus and his followers on the road to Rome. It is a short scene, but I could still have lived without it.
Peter O’Toole has a small, but pivotal role as food critic Antono Ego, who killed Remy’s hero with a bad review. O’Toole does such good job of sounding evil and menacing that I was shocked to see his name in the credits and not Christopher Lee’s. Also making a cameo, as well as designing the kitchen, is the famous Thomas Keller of The French Laundry fame. If you have never heard of him, don’t worry, you will. He is one of the greatest chefs working today.
The story is fast and fun, the rat wants to be a chef and, surprise, gets to be one with the help of a hapless human, with the pretty silly name of Linguini. There are a lot of great chases, group scenes and cityscapes of Paris to make the heart skip a beat. Lots of cool little visuals as well, like the fact that the evil critics typewriter looks like a skull and his carpet has a design like an old style coffin.
The children liked Ratatouille, their parents liked Ratatouille, and I liked Ratatouille.
