Too Many Chefs Strengthen the Stew in Ratatouille
Written: Jun 16 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: good story, strong characters, very funny, breathtaking Paris visuals
Cons: Linguini's name distracting, draws on a lot of commonly used elements
The Bottom Line: Ratatouille manages to present a good story filled with interesting and appealing characters that entertain while still pushing a message.
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| quasar's Full Review: Ratatouille |
Everyone has hopes and dreams, but not all hopes and dreams are equally likely to come true. Remy dreams of being a chef, but his dream seems doomed to fail. For one thing, his family is dead set against it. For another, he rarely has access to choice ingredients (or, for that matter, any ingredients not stolen from a garbage dump). Oh yeah, did I mention that Remy's a rat?
Remy has his heart set on cooking, though, especially after reading Chef Gusteau's book Anyone Can Cook and seeing episodes of his television show (both during clandestine visits to a nearby farmhouse to gather spices from the kitchen). To date his exceptional nose for food has only managed to get him appointed family poison sniffer, a distasteful job requiring him to smell every bit of moldy, spoiled, spotty, mushy trash that passes for food in his family. He wants more, but knows it's unlikely he'll ever get the chance.
Disaster leads to opportunity when the need to abandon the farmhouse results in Remy's separation from his family and relocation to the sewer underneath Gusteau's restaurant in Paris. He seizes the chance to fix the culinary disaster inadvertently caused by the new garbage boy Linguini and in the process invents a new soup that takes the critics ad the city by storm. Soon Remy and Linguini are a team, Remy providing the talent and skill and Linguini the face needed to make his creations palatable to the human world. Can they keep it up without getting discovered? Can their odd friendship survive despite their very different backgrounds and interests? What happens as Linguini's fame increases and spreads? You can find the answer to these questions and many more in the Pixar film Ratatouille.
While obviously filled with themes like the importance of following your dreams and issues such as balancing what you want with the needs and expectations of the ones you love, Ratatouille never gets preachy. It overlays its messages into a complex and multi-layered story filled with interesting characters, a cohesive look at underbelly of a city and the folks who serve the elite of Paris, and a great deal of humor.
The hand to foot existence of the rats living among the cubby holes and crevices of old houses and scrounging about for food and other necessities provides a nice backdrop for a story about a loner who doesn't fit in. The world he discovers, a world none of his family understands or is even willing to consider might have merit, is also one filled with invisible folks running around behind the scenes. There are many parallels between Remy's two worlds, parallels neither side would ever even remotely conceive exist. I really liked that.
Remy has a great deal of personality, almost more so when he's interacting with Linguini. He doesn't verbalize at all in these scenes, but rather relies on expression and pantomime to communicate. It's a testament to the Pixar animation skill that he feels so very real when there's no actor lending the pictures additional life.
Linguini is also a great character, although I must admit I found his name a distraction. Name aside, though, he's a bit of a bumbling innocent who means well but never quite manages to get the hang of anything. He grows through the relationship with Remy but his path is not without bumps of its own. His is the type of character that often would be the focus of the bumbling young boy makes good story; including him as a character who is the foil rather than the focus but still allowing him to follow the same path he would as a protagonist was a brilliant move.
Most of the characters, be they good or evil or somewhere in between (and this movie has a lot of characters who fall in between the two), had a great deal of sparkle and life. Other than Remy, the human characters had much more distinctive personalities than the rats, but that worked for me too. The rat society is portrayed as something of a hive structure with a large family unit foraging and supporting each other. Individualism isn't encouraged, so the lack of individual personalities among most of the rats fit the world they lived in.
The visuals in Ratatouille are crisp and sharp, but other than some breathtaking panoramic views of Paris, they don't particularly stand out. They're there to support the story and they do just that, blending in and making everything feel real rather than becoming a major player in their own right. It was extremely well done, but if you're looking for the type of special effects and visual treats found in The Incredibles you're going to be disappointed.
What you will find in this movie (written and directed by Brad Bird who also wrote and directed The Incredibles) is the same type of humor showcases in the earlier film. Physical comedy rules, but it's clever physical comedy and often accompanied by a crisp joke or cultural reference (without any real anachronisms) that makes the physical humor even more effective. While one or two repeated bits were taken too far, most of the time Bird knew just how far to go and when repetition would and would not add to the story and to the humor. I laughed loudly and often during this movie.
Ratatouille manages to present a good story filled with interesting and appealing characters that entertain while still pushing a message. It's clever and cohesive and builds on common elements and tropes of the "chase your dream" picture without ever falling into hyperbole or becoming just another boring and predictable movie. It succeeds in part because it gently pokes fun at the conventional elements of a film in that genre and because it figured out when to follow the traditional flow and when to turn it on its ear. Ratatouille takes a variety of ingredients common to these sorts of movies and manages to stir them all together into a masterpiece any chef would be proud to serve to the hungry masses and the hungry elite alike. Whatever category you fall into, go see it.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Feel-good Movie
Viewing Method: Sneak Preview at My Local Theater
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