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STUDIO: Disney
MSRP: $29.99
RATED: G
RUNNING TIME: 111 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Fine Food & Film: A Conversation Between Brad Bird and Thomas Keller
• Deleted Scenes
• Two shorts: Lifted and Your Friend The Rat

The Pitch

"Hi, I’m Brad Bird, and I can make a fantastic movie out of anything!"

The Humans

Patton Oswalt; Ian Holm; Brian Dennehy; Peter O’Toole; Will Arnett; Janine Garafalo

The Nutshell

Remy is a rat with a nose for food. That
sets him apart from his fellow rats, each of whom only has an appetite for
garbage. Separated from his family, Remy finds himself on the windowsill of
Gusteau’s, formerly the best restaurant in Paris. There he has an unlikely
encounter with Linguini, the garbage boy, with whom Remy forges a very bizarre
Master Blaster sort of partnership, the better to cook wonderful food.


The Lowdown

Count me among the many people who never believed in this film. In fact, there’s not been an official CHUD review until this one; I don’t know how Nick, Devin and Jeremy feel about the movie, but I didn’t bother to see it until late in the summer. I felt like an idiot afterward, of course, since Ratatouille is one of the best movies of the year. I’ll never doubt Brad Bird again. Not that I should have in the first place; merely on the basis of his previous two features I should have been first in line for this one.


We run Bartertown.


You have to admit the story is a tough sell. A rat who loves cooking ends up in a famous French restaurant where he puppets a lanky kitchen boy to culinary stardom? Yeah, right. Why is that tougher to swallow than living toys or cars? Well, maybe not the cars — I’ll still avoid that one.

But like Brad Bird’s earlier films, Ratatouille is an ideal mix of pitch-perfect dialogue, slapstick comedy and genuine warmth. Part of my lack of faith had to do with Bird and co-director Jan Pinkava’s reliance upon Patton Oswalt for the voice of Remy, our foodie rat. He shines, of course — seeing glimpses of Bird’s working methods I’d never expect him to stick with something that wasn’t working — but on paper the combo seemed so odd.


As long as it came from the top, it doesn’t ruin the food.


Indeed, there’s no member of the cast who
fails to excel. Peter O’Toole is impeccable as the uber-critic Anton Ego, Ian
Holm provides comic antagonism as Skinner, the diminutive chef at Gusteau’s,
and Janine Garafalo does some of her best work as the prickly Colette. And Lou Romano, who’s begun to make himself a career voicing for Pixar, makes the goofy Linguini more than a foil for Remy and Skinner.

Ratatouille cruises along at a
nearly ideal pace, letting every beat of the story breathe for just the right
length of time. What impresses is that, even at almost two hours, the film
feels light and brief, with a single driving story idea. Yet subplots have
ample time to develop and thrive, like Chef Skinner’s frozen food sideline and
the conflict between Remy and his fellow rats.

See the film more than once and
you’ll realize that every scene has been thoroughly turned inside out a dozen
times and play-tested to the limits of every animator. That’s pretty much the
inversion of a basic law of cooking; work over any dish too thoroughly and
you’ll end up with inedible mush. So Pixar manages to utterly disregard a basic rule over the world the film is striving to
create, and achieves amazing work by doing so.


The Lost Weekend.

It seems almost redundant at this point to waste words on the technical accomplishment of any Pixar film; the studio becomes more assured and capable from feature to feature. To hell with it, though. This is an amazing movie to look at, and not just because Pixar’s experiments with hair and texture have given us images that are more lifelike every year. The credit is due more to the synergy between animators and voice actors. The exaggerated human designs here make a fine compliment to the vaguely anthropomorphized rats, and all are animated with an attention to detail that exceeds anything else being produced today.


Dance floor rule #12: Don’t point.

I do wish the film’s message of ‘don’t
steal, work’ wasn’t so heavy-handed; at times even children will probably feel
bludgeoned with the moral. But the balance is a look at the role of criticism
that’s no less effective for being comic and exaggerated to the point of
absurdity. M. Night Shyamalan made himself a laughingstock with a flailingly
defensive take on the relationship between critics and creators, but Bird skips
the histrionics and cuts right to the chase.
Yeah, critics can be pompous
and more interested in themselves than their subjects, but they can also
shepherd new talent and ideas.

I’d like to think that a film
like Ratatouille wouldn’t need such intervention, but that’s obviously too
optimistic. Just ask Brad Bird if a little extra help might have been warranted
when The Iron Giant was in theaters.

The Package

Disney is cheaping out. Sure, this disc has the very funny short film Lifted, which played before Ratatouille in theaters. There’s also the new and equally funny short Your Friend The Rat, which I’ll get to in a minute. But there’s no Brad Bird commentary. No new Wall-E trailer. Deleted scenes and making of are basically combined into one 15-minute package, and there’s another 15 minutes dedicated to a comparison of the arts of cooking and animation, discussed by Brad Bird and chef Thomas Keller.



But while that feature is presented as a conversation between Bird and Keller, they’re not actually in a room together, just speaking individually with their ‘conversation’ born in the editing room. The paltry features are well-produced, but you can easily sense the 2-disc edition Disney has in waiting.


Want. This. Game.


Now: Your Friend The Rat. This short, which didn’t make it onto the collected Pixar Shorts disc reviewed here, is really a wonderful thing. Remy narrates a brief history of rat-kind with reluctant assistance from his brother Emile. Ratatouille kept people in their seats with an end credits sequence that was stylistically far different from the actual film, and Your Friend The Rat takes the stylistic diversion further. While Remy and Emile are animated as in the film, the rest of the short veers from one style to the next, with artful line work, woodcuts, faux silent films and even a 16-bit video game emulation. The picture breezes by, but is both informative and a hell of a lot of fun. It’s the surprise jewel of this paltry batch of extras.

8.9 out of 10