As a parent, I’ve come to dread animated cartoons as much as I dread reading about what career suicide Lindsay Lohan’s up to this week.
But Pixar’s Ratatouille looked different. It literally looks different — the guys (and gals) at Pixar apparently felt they had to outdo themselves in presenting the tale of a rat gifted with culinary expertise in a Parisian restaurant. So there are immensely detailed scenes set in the French countryside, where foodie-rat Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) discovers that various combinations of food can produce a symphony for the senses. This revelation is lost on his fellow rats, including brother Emile (Peter Sohn) and father rat Django (Brian Dennehy). Every leaf, tree, stone wall and chateau is lovingly rendered by Pixar’s artists. It’s as though they’ve reached some kind of zenith of photorealism.
But the countryside is nothing compared to their rendition of Paris: a city of tiny lights, evocative cobblestones and alleyways, a beautiful trip along the Seine, and of course, the heart of the action: inside the kitchen of Gusteau’s, a famed Paris restaurant now fallen on hard times. Every rivet in the meat locker, every scuffed floor tile — even the scratches and nicks from kitchen knives on the doors and cooking surfaces — is carefully rendered. Most people I saw it with thought Ratatouille’s Paris looked more like Paris than the actual city does these days.
This is good, because it allows you to suspend your disbelief rather quickly, surrendering to a children’s cartoon that, as usual, has an adult message just below the surface. You can’t pitch a cartoon nowadays without selling it to the parents as well.
It also helps that the subject matter is juicy and delicious. How Remy finds himself tossed along the seas of fate (rather, the sewers of Paris) to end up inside the kitchen of Gusteau’s is just one of a series of quick changes that keep the story gassing along. He meets there a bumbling lad named Linguini (Lou Romano) who bears a letter from the former lover of the restaurant’s namesake, chef Auguste Gusteau, asking for a job for her son. The crusty, dwarfish head chef, Skinner (an utterly transformed Ian Holm), makes Linguini a mop-up boy, but when the kid accidentally ruins a vat of soup, Remy can’t stop himself from fixing it — dashing across the kitchen, unseen, to toss in leaves of basil, dollops of cream, in a daring display of guerrilla cuisine.
The late Gusteau, you see, wrote a democratic cookbook called Anyone Can Cook, which sticks in the craw of Skinner (representing the established culinary hierarchy) and food critic Anton Ego (an icy Peter O’Toole). But this, of course, is the movie’s message: that not everyone can be great, but greatness can come — literally — from anywhere.
The message may be a little subtle for four-year-olds. Our daughter loved the parts with the rats, and when Remy communicated with Linguini. But she declared, “This movie’s so long!” whenever animated humans appeared and talked onscreen for more than two minutes. So maybe a culinary manifesto is a little advanced for the young ‘uns.
Our daughter may have noticed a resemblance, though, between Ratatouille and an old children’s book classic, Anatole. Written in 1956, this Paris-set illustrated story by Eve Titus tells of a mouse who wants to contribute something to the world, not just steal food. So he visits a once-famous cheese factory, now fallen on hard times, and starts leaving around little critical notes to improve certain cheeses. It works, but no one ever finds out who the mysterious “Anatole” is. It ends with an implied friendship between the vermin and human population of Paris, another angle that is explored in Ratatouille.
But to its credit, Pixar’s people have taken a few pinches of this older kid’s story and updated it with cups and cups of modern gusto. The pace is frenetic. The comic timing is perfectly executed. The casting of voices is brilliant (even Janeane Garofalo as a knife-wielding, French-accented female chef).
The most hilarious contrivance of Ratatouille involves Remy “directing” Linguini in the kitchen. Since the hapless lad doesn’t know his way around a McDonald’s, let alone a French restaurant, Remy agrees to assist him by — wait for it — hiding under his toque and pulling tufts of his hair to carefully guide involuntary muscular movement. This display has to be seen to be believed.
The culmination of Ratatouille is completely ludicrous, of course, and even though generations of kids have been programmed to love a cartoon mouse named Mickey, it doesn’t follow that rats should be allowed to do kitchen duty. I’m sure even Parisians will not emerge from the movie with a newfound love for their furry rodent brothers. And the last time there was a movie built around a boy’s love for his rat, his name was Willard and it spawned a sequel and a bad Michael Jackson ballad (Ben).
I don’t know; I try to limit myself to viewing one or two animated cartoons a year now (even with a young daughter, so you can imagine what kind of ogre that makes me in her eyes). It’s just that most of them are pretty awful, as bad as the movie trailers that warn us of their coming. But this one is by Pixar, scripted and directed by Brad Bird, who got lots of high fives for The Incredibles a few years back. To navigate your way around the minefield of today’s animated cartoons takes something close to a culinary gift: you have to be able to sense garbage (Cars, Chicken Little) and seek out those rare truffles (The Incredibles, Over the Hedge). The nose usually knows: if mine wrinkles in disgust during a movie trailer, I know I’m not going anywhere near it.
But my brother-in-law Gary, a trained chef, loved Ratatouille, and he doesn’t praise movies set in kitchens too often. Top US chef Thomas Keller was reportedly a consultant for the cartoon. And though it doesn’t dole out any specific cooking lessons, the movie does speak to the artistic urge in mostly everyone, including every chef who wants to make something that will surprise, amaze and delight the senses. For the most part, Ratatouille does that. I’d give it four stars (out of five).