I am, in general, a fan of what Pixar puts out, and part of that comes from films like Ratatouille. Now, as far as I am concerned, Ratatouille comes in the middle of a long stretch of films, starting with the original Toy Story and ending with Toy Story 3, show the animation studio with a good eleven films, and the only one I find subpar is the original Cars. I suppose a case can be made for A Bug’s Life being a little less than stellar, but that’s a pretty solid streak that many studios, working in either animation or live action, would probably love to have. Since Toy Story 3, the studio’s output hasn’t been quite as impressive, with a gem like Inside Out or Soul scattered here and there, but even the better films since Toy Story 3 haven’t felt to me quite as innovative and entertaining as the stuff that came before.
I mean, Ratatouille made me care about a rat that wants to be a chef. Talking animals are fine, but my general knowledge or even interest in haute cuisine is pretty much nonexistent.
Here’s the thing: the first time I saw this film in a theater, I was liking it well enough, but it wasn’t quite going to be one of my top-tier Pixar films. It wasn’t on the level of the likes of Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, or Ratatouille director Brad Bird’s previous film The Incredibles. I mean, I get the basic premise: rats are considered vermin, and Remy (voice of Patton Oswalt) is unusual by rat standards. Unlike the rest of his colony, including his well-meaning brother Émile (Peter Sohn, who recently directed Pixar’s latest Elemental) and his very traditionalist father Django (the late Brian Dennehy), Remy has no desire to steal garbage and then eat it, but Remy’s highly refined senses of smell and taste mean he can pick up makes him valuable for picking out rat poison from whatever food the others want to eat.
But Remy’s passion leads him to celebrity chef Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett), deceased owner of a popular restaurant, cookbook author, and a man who goes by the motto “Anyone can cook” though the caveat seems to be “Not everyone can cook well.” The thing is Remy can cook well. He’s studied Gusgteau’s cookbook, and even though Remy’s passion for that cookbook did get the entire colony chased away from the farm they were living on and into the big city of Paris. Separated from the rest of the colony, Remy soon finds himself in Gusteau’s restaurant with Gusteau’s spirit (a figment of Remy’s imagination) acting as something of a guide. And it isn’t too long before Remy finds an outlet to cook with, namely Alfredo Linguini (Pixar animator Lou Romano), Gusteau’s hapless illegitimate son. Linguini can’t cook, but Remy can. Linguini is a human who can be in a restaurant kitchen without any real issue aside from the fact he can’t cook. Remy is a rat, and if he even tried to step foot into a kitchen, he could be killed by the humans in there. But as it is, Remy’s skills are clear to Linguini despite a language barrier, and the two find a method for Remy to cook when the clever rat figures out how to literally use Linguini as a puppet by yanking on the young man’s hair. Hidden under Linguini’s chef’s hat, Remy can cook, and Linguini can get acclaim, all to the detriment of the horrid current owner of Gusteau’s, Chef Skinner (Ian Holm).
OK, so, when I saw this one the first time, there were a number of things I liked about how this film turned out. I liked the general attention to detail on how Remy was different from the other rats. Oswalt is a guy with a lot of geek cred, and I am pretty sure if you are doing something with any decently-known geek franchise, getting Oswalt to come onboard probably isn’t that hard. But as for Remy, it’s small things like how he walks on his hind legs unlike the other rats who travel on all fours. Why? He has to eat with his rat hands and would prefer not to have everything he stepped in go into his food. The scenes before he uses Linguini as a puppet show a lot of cartoon ingenuity as Remy uses things around the kitchen to clamber up and down pots, toss ingredients into pots, and enjoy the aromas. Remy, as advised by the spectral Gusteau, is a chef. Chefs create. Thieves take.
By the by, Pixar has a habit of putting character cameos into their films, but they actually put the characters from future films into their work. You can spot a Lotso bear in one scene in Up, but for this one, Dug the Dog’s shadow appears briefly in an apartment building Remy runs through as he looks for food and shelter.
However, as much fun as I was having with the film up until that point, the film still had to somehow interest me in French cuisine. And, quite frankly, it wasn’t doing that during my first viewing. There was nothing wrong with the film. It just wasn’t working for me. Linguini’s romance with the only woman in the kitchen, Colette (Janeane Garofalo), is sweet. His taking credit for the restaurant’s success is to be expected. Skinner’s desperate attempts to catch Remy and prove there was something going on with that rat has a Loony Toons vibe to it. Like most Pixar films, the cast was not filled with big name actors but was instead made up of somewhat famous people with recognizable voices full of character. It was very much a case where I was watching the film while thinking as much as I liked what I saw, there didn’t seem to be much special about it.
And then Anton Ego (the late, great Peter O’Toole) showed up.
Ego is set up as sort of the ultimate villain. He’s a food critic, and every bit of his character design, to say nothing of O’Toole’s sneering delivery, makes him out to be at the least a joyless character, someone who will have to be won over. I can expect that Remy might be able to win the man over. What I did not expect was the final act’s story as Linguini reveals to the rest of the Gusteau staff that Remy has been the chef, causing all the humans except for Colette to quit because, well, the head chef was a rat. That leads to Remy bringing the rest of the colony in to help. As much as Linguini was being pressured by Skinner to give up so Skinner could inherit the restaurant that was actually Linguini’s by right, Django was trying to pressure Remy to give up hanging around humans. Unlike Skinner, Django can be won over, and the colony does what it can to help Remy achieve his dreams by winning over Ego.
And, again, this is the portion of the film that ultimately won me over. I can expect Ego to give Remy a thumbs up. I can expect some great animation as a horde or rats prepare gourmet food. What I did not expect was just how much Ego was won over. It helps that O’Toole managed to nail both Ego’s dark pessimism with his cheerful joy. And it was that joy that I found gave me joy in the audience. Ego doesn’t hate food or eating out. He loved food. He said so himself. What he wanted was something that would hit his highly developed pallet just right, and Remy somehow figured it out by making, well, ratatouille. Described as a “peasant’s meal,” the dinner sent Ego back to his childhood where his mother served the selfsame meal to him. I expect Brad Bird’s films to show excellent animation. He’s been doing it since The Simpsons and on into work like The Iron Giant. It was the total transformation of Ego from joyless shadow to happy eater, the one man who actually was well aware a rat cooked his meal and he didn’t even care. That actually really won me over in the end. Ego wasn’t an enemy. He just wanted a good meal, afterwhich he can wax poetic about the chef as artist.
I figure, in a sense, that was me during my first viewing. I was looking for something good, and when I got to the end of the film, I had a satisfying ending. I wouldn’t say I am as hard to please as Ego at the start of the film, but like him in the end, I was willing to tell Pixar to “surprise me”.
By the by, given how much Pixar has made sequels and spin-offs of many of their better films, how odd is it that Ratatouille has been basically untouched. Even Up got a series of shorts, with one appearing just before the recent Elemental. Ratatouille has a single short about rats throughout history, but that’s about it. Will there be more of this world and these characters? You know what? I don’t think we need more. Maybe we don’t need to eat the same meal no matter how much we like it. Maybe, just maybe, a little variety makes life worthwhile.
NEXT: Huh, I finish this column up saying variety makes life worthwhile, and what’s up next? One of my all-time favorite films from one of my all-time favorite directors. Be back soon for 1990’s Goodfellas.
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