Ratatouille

Review By: Brian DePasquale
BrianDePasquale @TheCinemaSource.com

At first glance, Pixar's new animated summer blockbuster does not look much different than its successful predecessors. The movie contains the same familiar slapstick intended for small children and the consistently clever references to adult life. The visuals are expectedly dazzling and innovative, a brilliant combination of modern technology with old school composition. Ever since Toy Story exploded on the scene, the company has set the standard for excellence in Hollywood animation. No doubt the excitement exuded by the film world permeated generously into the mainstream box office, establishing a winning formula for Disney year after year. Unfortunately, that formula has calculated many quality pieces of entertainment, but rarely the elements of something greater and more substantial. With Ratatouille, our friends at Pixar have achieved their creative zenith by using their own excellence as a metaphoric tribute to high art.

Remy, the film’s lead character, is sick of eating garbage. His rat family searches through trash each night chewing on anything eatable, but he cannot stomach it any longer. He has a brilliant sense of smell that his father misuses as a way to detect whether apple cores have rat poison on them. Remy also has big dreams of becoming a chef after watching Chef Gusteau’s cooking show on an old woman's television. His personal culinary standards provide a frustrating cross between youthful optimism and brutal realism. How can a rat become a great cook?

Lucky for Remy, he gets separated from his family one night and stumbles upon the kitchen of Gusteau's famous restaurant. Unfortunately, Gusteau has recently passed away and the wonderful five star reputation the location once boasted has been blemished by villainous food critic Anton Ego who compares the food in one review at Gusteau's to Chef Boyardee. The place is now run by the mean-spirited Chef Skinner. He intends to sell the Gusteau name as a way to sell microwavable supermarket items until Gusteau's long lost son Linguini shows up one day to work. To Skinner, the boy is a threat to a fortune.

So the movie's table is set well. Remy and Linguini will work together to turn Gusteau's reputation around and defuse the commercial time bomb that is Chef Skinner. This is great stuff, but far from what makes Ratatouille a special film. What elevates it above its contemporaries is its wonderful meditation on art and criticism. Consider a beautifully conceived scene in which Remy tastes different foods and we are able to see visually how artful his taste can be. The background behind him shifts to a black palate streaming with flashing fireworks of varyingly exuberant color. I have never seen a movie articulate an appreciation for the culinary arts better. Gusteau's kitchen is a myriad of style and warmth as if the smell of Linguini's soup could leap off ...