"Ratatouille"

This delicious tale of a rat who cooks is pure joy, a grand achievement -- one of the most beautiful animated pictures ever made.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Photo: Disney/Pixar

Remy in "Ratatouille."

June 29, 2007 | One of the great pleasures of Brad Bird's "Ratatouille" -- just one of many in a picture that is itself about the rewards and the frustrations of seeking pleasure -- is its inherent lightness, the way it seems wholly unaware that it's a grand achievement of animation, even though it is. Bird is one of the great modern animators -- as well as an astonishingly gifted filmmaker, period -- precisely because he doesn't set out to wow us. His colors are never garish; his characters are always written, fleshed out, not just storyboarded; and his ideas, while easy enough to grasp, stretch beyond the typical homilies of being true to oneself, or of asserting that everyone is special. In fact, Bird's pictures -- which include the gentle but assertive 1999 Cold War fable "The Iron Giant" and the 2004 superhero adventure "The Incredibles," a movie about families and the nature of democracy -- honor and celebrate individuality even as they recognize that the development of potential (and not just mindless praise of the raw, unshaped material in all of us) is what's important. Each of us has a specific set of gifts, but recognizing them isn't enough; it's what we do with them that counts.

And so with the Disney/Pixar "Ratatouille," Bird gives us the most distasteful setup imaginable -- rats! in the kitchen! not only touching the food, but preparing it -- and turns it around into something we couldn't have expected. Remy (his voice is that of comedian Patton Oswalt) is a French rat with a highly attuned sense of taste and smell, such that his father, Django (Brian Dennehy) and his large network of rat friends and family put him to work sniffing around for hidden rat poison. Remy knows that as a rat, it's his lot in life to scrounge and to steal. Still, he's a rat with a dream: He wants to become a chef, to be the creator of something, not merely a thief or hanger-on.

Remy's idol is a jolly, rotund celebrity chef named Gusteau (Brad Garrett), whose dictum is "Anyone can cook." At least that was his dictum: Gusteau, whose heart was broken over a bad review by spiteful food critic Anton Ego (a deliciously nasty Peter O'Toole), which resulted in the loss of one of his restaurant's stars, has passed on to that great kitchen in the sky. But he hasn't left this earth altogether. A cheerful, vaporous mentor rising from the pages of one of his own cookbooks, he appears to Remy to guide and inspire this sincere and intelligent little rat. Remy finds his way into the kitchen of the once-great chef's Paris restaurant -- which is now being run by a greedy, self-serving operator named Skinner (Ian Holm) -- and forges a tentative, tempestuous kinship with its skinny, lackadaisical garbage boy, Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano), who will help him do the work of turning his dreams into reality.

"Ratatouille" is a practical-minded picture, a story that's less about dreams than it is about work. But it's also about the delight that work, done well, can bring. Bird captures the heady chaos of working in a kitchen, the edgy, adrenaline-fueled ballet in which a handful of players avoid one another, and help one another, as each keeps a hand in a dozen things at once. Bird shows us arms and legs dashing by in a blur, onions being chopped with surgeonly precision, the contents of frypans being tended as if they were great art instead of just dollops of eggs and cream. (Even if you've never worked in a restaurant yourself, you'll recognize the authenticity of the setting if you've read Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential"; Bourdain gets a thank-you credit on the film.) The kitchen of "Ratatouille" is also, incidentally, a racially diverse one: This may be a cartoon Paris, but it doesn't exist completely in a cartoon world.

In an early scene, the ghost of Gusteau takes Remy on a tour of the restaurant kitchen, asking him to name all the players and their functions. When Gusteau gets to the lowly, gangly helper Alfredo, Remy says, "Oh, that's nobody." Gusteau quickly corrects him -- "He is not nobody. He is a part of the kitchen" -- and from that simple statement, the ultimate meaning of "Ratatouille" begins to unfold. In Brad Bird's world, everyone has a role to play. As one character will intimate later, not everyone can be a great artist. But great art can come from anyone, or from anywhere.

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