Ratatouille

By: The Dweeb

October 2007

DVD Features Video: 2.25:1 Audio:Dolby Digital 5.1 FRENCH: Dolby Digital 5.1 SPANISH: Dolby Digital 5.1 Deleted Scenes Your Friend The Rat Animated Short Fine Food and Film Featurette “Lifted” Animated short Theatrical release: 6/29/2007 DVD released on 11/06/2007 by Disney Running time of 111 minutes Starring: Ian Holm, Peter O’Toole, Janeane Garofalo, Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano Director: Brad Bird Plot: A rat named Remy dreams of becoming a great French chef despite his family’s wishes and the obvious problem of being a rat in a decidedly rodent-phobic profession. When fate places Remy in the sewers of Paris, he finds himself ideally situated beneath a restaurant made famous by his culinary hero, Auguste Gusteau. Despite the apparent dangers of being an unlikely - and certainly unwanted - visitor in the kitchen of a fine French restaurant, Remy’s passion for cooking soon sets into motion a hilarious and exciting rat race that turns the culinary world of Paris upside down.

Who ever thought that mixing rats with fine French cooking would work? Apparently, Pixar did and once again have continued their winning streak in computer animated fare. As always, they demonstrate why they are the premiere outfit in Hollywood for creating such fantastic movies that can be enjoyed by young and old alike. I think that by the end of this review I will be able to spell Ratatouille correctly as well.

Ratatouille is a departure for Pixar this time. Instead of going with the stylized cutesy fish, monsters, bugs, cars and toys, they have created an almost real world look at rats versus the high stakes French restaurant kitchen world. Missing from the movie is the emotional attachment the viewer will have with the characters. The central character still remains a talking animal, but he only chats with the audience or his relatives and never directly with any of the human characters. For the casting this time they have strayed away from the easily recognizable voices so it doesn’t interfere with the embodiment of these characters in your mind. You don’t think to yourself “Oh that’s Peter O’Toole’s voice”. I actually had to look it up to see who were the voices this time, its nice that the actors sat on the back burner for this one.

Director/writer Brad Bird (also of The Incredibles) this time has taken the unlikely hero theme and twisted it to become the story of a rat who knows how to cook gourmet who then saves the day in the kitchen of a once 5 star rated restaurant when France’s toughest food critic steps up to the plate. It’s actually a delightful story full of great characters, and is actually sort of an educational look into what it takes to work in such a high pressure environment. My only complaint is that they did not take the time to explore more interaction with some of the other characters that work at Gusteaus kitchen as they were only touched upon.

The quality of this production was as usual top notch, the animation is just simply stunning and you can see that great care and time was taken to render every last detail and movement to make it fluid and seem almost spontaneous or even organic. Like this was actually put on film with live actors and then rendered. The colors, the sounds, lighting all create an atmosphere where you can almost taste the food that is being created. The final frontier in home theatre is the inclusion of smell, in this case it almost warrants it. OK, just kidding about that last part, who wants to smell a bunch of rats?

The DVD package this time is only on a single disc, and I’m afraid that now HD is starting to become more prevalent the good stuff will only be found on the more expensive and as yet undecided format. Hopefully regular DVD will not start playing second fiddle to its Blu-ray or HD-DVD bretheren anytime soon. Anyways, there is still a healthy assortment of extra material contained on this DVD, including the hilarious animated short that accompanies every Pixar film and an animated short featuring our new rat friends. There is of course a short documentary interviewing the principle creators exploring the artistry of the creative process in filmmaking and cooking which follow a similar pattern. There are the usual items included like deleted scenes and the trailers as well.

Overall I liked it, my son loves it and so did my wife. I think with repeated viewings (a 4 year old can never grow tired of these films) I am sure to like it even more.

Reviewer’s Opinion: BUY IT!!