81) Ratatouille

Ratatouille (2007)

Director: Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava (co-director)

Starring: Patton Oswalt, Ian Holm, Lou Romano, Brian Dennehy, Peter Sohn, Peter O'Toole, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo, Will Arnett, John Ratzenberger

After putting myself through the wringer watching Crash, I decided that I needed to watch something nice and light to clear my mind of unsavoury images of car crash fetishists. You don't get much nicer and lighter than Pixar so I decided to go with one which I first watched while standing behind the counter at Blockbuster, and had been meaning to watch ever since to see if it was as good as I remembered it being from the half-watching I gave it while working, Ratatouille.

Remy (Oswalt) is a rat with an incredible sense of taste. This superior palette is a curse because it means that he can not be satisfied with the garbage which makes up a rat's staple diet. He dreams of being a chef, and after being separated from his family while fleeing the country house they once lived in, he finds himself in Paris, at the restaurant which belonged to his hero, chef Auguste Gusteau. The restaurant's reputation was tarnished when it received a scathing review from influential food critic Anton Ego, and following the death of Gusteau is now run by Skinner, who trades off the Gusteau name by attaching it to everything from burritos to hot dogs. Remy, with the help of Gusteau, who appears to him as an Obi-Wan Kenobi type spirit, puts his culinary skills to work to fix a soup which has been destroyed by kitchen-hand, Linguini, who in turn recieves the credit when the soup wins rave reviews from customers and critics. Linguini is promoted to a cook, but is aware that it was Remy that actually posesses the ability, so the two of them must then work out how to communicate and cooperate if they are going to make the most of the opportunity that has been placed before them.

One thing I love about Pixar's films is that they do an amazing job of selecting their voice actors. Dreamworks, Pixar's main competitor in the animation game, really tries to sell their movies on the back of the big names in the voice cast: the Shrek series with Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Antonio Banderes, John Lithgow, Julie Andrews, John Cleese, Justin Timberlake, Shark Tale had Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Renee Zellweger, Jack Black, Angelina Jolie and Martin Scorsese, Kung Fu Panda had Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu and Ian McShane (not quite sure how much overlap there was between Kung Fu Panda fans and Deadwood fans, but you can't count it out). Pixar, on the other hand, doesn't seem to use their voice actors as a key part of their marketing strategy. This frees them up to choose people on the basis of the suitability of their voice, even if they aren't a sellable name, and as a result really strengthens the characterisation in the films. Ratatouille is a fantastic example of this. In this case they have given the main roles to two relatively small names in Oswalt and Romano, both of whom fit the characters to a tee. Then, the 'names' that they do have in the cast; Holm, O'Toole, are there because they offer a specific quality. Then the rest of the cast is fleshed out with actors with very distinctive voices like Dennehy, Garrett, Arnett Garofalo, and, of course, John Ratzenberger (Cliff Claven for Cheers fans), who holds the honour of having appeared as a voice actor in every Disney-Pixar film.

The detail in the image that you get with Pixar is just amazing. The images that they put on the screen are genuinely beautiful. In the case of Ratatouille you not only get these breathtaking, postcard-like images of a surreal Paris, you also get completely digitised food which manages to look delicious, which I'm assuming is no mean feat.

It was funny watching this in the midst of Masterchef fever. I'm used to watching cooking on television now, but as I'm watching Linguini and Remy cooking in Ratatouille I found myself wanting more explanation. What was he cooking? What was that spice he just put in? The people say they love it. What do they love about it? Bird probably does not intend for people to view the cooking scenes as though they were instructional videos, but I found I couldn't help it. Masterchef has conditioned me that way.

Ratatouille was Brad Bird's third film, after The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. It appears that he is about to get his shot with live-action filmmaking, with his name being attached as the director for Mission Impossible 4. That may seem like quite a leap from animation to live-action, like it would require a completely different skill set, but when you watch Bird's animated films you can see they have a real live-action quality to them. As a director of animation, Bird is very much an artist rather than a technician, displaying a real knack for things like shot composition, which you don't always see in animated films.

Ratatouille didn't quite have the profile that Finding Nemo and The Incredibles did before it, of Wall-E and Up had after it, but it definitely belongs in that group (it is no let down like Cars). An interesting stepping stone from The Incredibles to the more adventurous projects of Wall-E and Up, Ratatouille is a real gem of a movie.