Ratatouille: Not Just for the Kids’ Table
Voices of Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano, and Janeane Garafalo

By Breanne Boland July 12, 2007 Issue

Pixar has gained its renown by creating films that appeal equally to adults and children. Generally, they’ve stayed firmly in the land of juvenilia, even if their intelligent scripts held firmly to a higher maturity — toys, make-believe monsters, and families with kids that give the younger part of the audience something to relate to.

The Incredibles worked both as a neato superhero movie and as a family drama. Ratatouille steps further toward the dramatic end of things — sure, it’s about talking rats, but it’s also about aspirations, family expectations, and ambition in a rigid class system. Ok, that last one is probably more than the folks behind this film hoped most people would bother to get from it, but Pixar does that. The Incredibles was about cool superheroes that stretch, disappear and fly, but it was also about the danger of stagnation of self and relationships, just as Finding Nemo was about accepting risk in an unavoidably dangerous world.

In Ratatouille, Remy the food-loving rat lives a fairly comfortable life with his enormous rat family, making do with food from the compost pile behind an old French woman’s farmhouse. His superior sense of smell makes him the rats’ official poison detector, but otherwise a strict separation is enforced between humans and their species — understandable, as the human world is rife with traps and cages and even worse fates.

When his family has to flee their countryside home, Remy ends up in Paris and makes an unlikely alliance with gawky, untalented Linguini, a young newcomer to a posh Paris restaurant whose heyday has passed. Working with Linguini, the pair quickly gains notice in the culinary press, making the risks even greater for a man who works in a kitchen but keeps a rat under his toque.

Ratatouille, like all Pixar films, is stunning. Their animated Paris is beautiful, the rat’s-eye-view voyages through walls entrancing, and the food — my god, the food. Do not go to Ratatouille hungry, as I did, or you will go straight from the movie theater to the grocery store to buy good bread and cheese, as I did. One of the cleverest things in the film is the visual representation of taste — swirls of dancing color, a most wonderful use of synesthesia. And the most unlikely source of hunger ever put to the screen.

I like food, very much, but I’ve never quite understood the trappings of fine dining — morsels measured out like we’re in a famine, layers of disparate dishes piled on each other like the plates are starved for real estate. But Ratatouille gives you the perspective of people who see food as art — people who don’t swallow the food unless they adore it. It’s the other strength of Pixar movies. They work in stereotypes and caricatures, but every character is a person. There are no one-note jokes.

The film also has to walk a thin line. Sure, we want Remy to fulfill his dreams and continue delighting the discriminating palates of Paris, but it’s a rat. In a kitchen. Touching the food with its lurid little pink paws. The rats are anthropomorphized enough that it takes a while for thoughts of the bubonic plague to come around, but in certain scenes where dozens of rats scurry across floors or hide in food, it’s enough to make you come home and get out the glue traps. Fortunately, the numerous other strengths of the film don’t let you dwell on it for very long.

Ratatouille is beautifully designed, intelligently written, and adeptly acted. In a genre that just about requires a happy ending, it takes no shortcuts, eschewing the expected whenever it can. It may sometimes go over the heads of the youngest cartoon fans, but as an adult movie viewer, I don’t consider that such a bad thing. Animation, like comics, is an undervalued medium, and it’s splendid to have an entity out there routinely proving that storytelling is the most important thing of all.

Bottom line: savory throughout

Coming Attractions
July 13
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (July 11) - The book version is known as the book where Harry hits the angry part of adolescence. It’s deserved — this volume marks the beginning of the end, with scary teachers, apathetic wizardry government, and a devastating death.

Captivity - An attractive young woman is mentally and physically tortured over an hour and a half.

July 20
Sunshine - The plot is a bit The Core-meets-Armageddon, as a team of astronauts must reignite our dying sun. But Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, is behind it, assuring that the film will contain more than traditional space heroics.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry - Adam Sandler and Kevin James pretend to be lovers in order to get domestic partner benefits. Ah, a whole film whose comedy is fueled by gay panic. An ideal double feature with Boat Trip, if you want to entirely sap your will to live.

Hairspray - The film version of the musical version of John Waters’ 1988 movie. Featuring Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah, and John Travolta in drag. Bummer that he’s replacing Harvey Fierstein, but Travolta’s worth watching when he surrenders himself to camp.

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