Ratatouille - Good Viewing

I took in Ratatouille on Sunday night and left the theatre a very satisfied movie goer.

Last year's Cars was the first Pixar movie I'd decided to dodge at the cinema—it looked a little too trite for my tastes, but I've since been told that it held up pretty well. Ratatouille, on the other hand, was not going to slip past me. The main reason for that is the director: Brad Bird.

The Incredibles was a masterful achievement, doing what Pixar does best by embedding relatively complex subtexts beneath a visually stunning layer of computer wizardry and well paced action. Moreover the script was polished to a gleam, and the characters evoked a genuine visceral engagement. It touched upon themes of exceptionalism—about how when everybody's special then nobody's special. It's a theme that Brad Bird has further built upon in Ratatouille, and much like The Incredibles he's done it with a deft hand that skillfully avoids the kind of violent message bludgeoning so often found in almost any other big budget animated film.

The choice of a rat as the protagonist is an interesting one. Rats are nearly universally reviled as the harbingers of death and disease (thank you, Black Death), so the use of a rat as both the main character and as an aspiring haute cuisine chef throws a prejudicial gauntlet down squarely in front of the audience. It's a direct challenge to the viewer's preconceptions of assigned stations and roles. Rats are horrible, pestilent creatures. Rats should never come near food or else they'll riddle it with their disease. Rats are borderline demonic and kept as pets by creeps and weirdos. To plonk one down in the middle of the kitchen of a schmicko restaurant is the ultimate heresy. We're just not culturally trained to readily accept a rat as a suitable subject for the kind of heartwarming anthropomorphism found in Ratatouille. And that's the film's primary genius. In order to accept Remy as a chef, so many of our other preconceived notions about how hereditary elements factor into our development in life are called into question. One of the main theses of film is that ultimately one's pedigree counts for nothing, and when all is said, done and counted it's the merits of the individual that really spell the difference between one who can cook and one who can be a celebrated chef. Linguini, despite being Gasteau's son, is an awful cook. Remy, despite being a rat, is an outstanding chef.

I'm digging too deep, I know.

There's an awful lot to say about this film—wet fur is evidently the latest effect that impressed the animators at Pixar the most; the character acting, especially by Skinner, is better than most living, breathing people; the commentary on the tension between personal limitations and aspirations is powerful yet not forceful—but it's more than space will allow. Just as with The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, Brad Bird and Pixar have delivered another near-perfect kids film that's more than suitable for the shorties, but serves up a whole lot more for the older set as well.

Update: Brad Bird and Patton Oswalt appeared on NPR's Fresh Air on 28 June. I was grateful to hear them discuss some of what I crapped on about in my post. It's also worth it for Patton's routine about Black Angus commercials. Check it out.