Pixar’s 2007 film Ratatouille opens on a rat who can taste. Remy, voiced by Patton Oswalt, has heightened senses of taste and smell, and he wants to cook. His colony, led by his father Django (Brian Dennehy), eats only for sustenance and stays wary of humans. That split — a gift set against a family’s fear — is the engine of the whole film, and it holds up.
Trailer, via Pixar.
A Rat in Gusteau’s Kitchen
The setup is clean. Remy idolizes the late Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett), whose motto is “Anyone can cook.” After the colony flees an elderly woman’s attic outside Paris, Remy ends up on the roof of Gusteau’s namesake restaurant. There he finds garbage boy Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano) ruining a leek soup. Remy fixes it. The soup goes out by accident and becomes a hit.
That accident is the film’s best piece of plotting. It gets Linguini kept on and gets Remy inside, and it does both without a speech.
The Hair-Pull Trick
Skinner (Ian Holm), Gusteau’s former sous-chef and the restaurant’s new owner and head chef, orders Linguini to take Remy outside and kill him. Instead, Linguini learns Remy understands him and talks him into helping. Remy then finds he can move Linguini like a marionette by pulling his hair while hiding under his toque.
It is a ridiculous mechanic. It is also the film’s whole argument in physical form: skill in one body, will in another, and neither worth much alone.
Colette Tatou Trains Linguini
Colette Tatou (Janeane Garofalo) is the restaurant’s only female chef. She pushes Skinner to keep Linguini and to honor Gusteau’s motto. She trains Linguini begrudgingly, then warms as he takes her advice. Garofalo plays her as competent and tired, which is the right read.
The kitchen hierarchy here is sharper than most live-action cooking stories bother to be.
Django’s Warning
Remy rejoins his clan and tells Django he intends to stay at the restaurant. Django answers with a group of exterminated rats, a display meant to prove humans are dangerous. It is the film’s hardest scene and its most honest one. Django is not a villain. He is a parent with evidence.
What Pixar Built Around the Food
The craft is the reason this film still gets named. Brad Bird directed and wrote it, from a story by Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco and Bird. Development started in 2000 with Pinkava’s concepts; he left Pixar in 2005, and Bird came in to direct and revise. The crew visited Paris for inspiration and consulted chefs in France and the United States.
Producer Brad Lewis interned at Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry, where Keller developed the confit byaldi used in the film. Michael Giacchino wrote the Paris-inspired score. None of that is trivia. It is why the food reads as food and not as texture.
Where Ratatouille Ranks
Ranked against the Pixar run of its decade, Ratatouille sits just below the very top tier, and the gap is not craft. It is nerve.
- The hair-pull mechanic is the most inventive comic device in any Pixar film of the 2000s.
- Peter O’Toole’s Anton Ego is the best-written supporting role in the film, and the least used.
- Skinner is a thin antagonist — greedy, small, and never once surprising.
- The exterminated-rats scene is the only moment that risks real discomfort, and the film backs off it fast.
The runtime is 111 minutes and it does not sag. The problem is that Ratatouille keeps choosing warmth where it has earned the right to be strange. A film about a rat who tastes better than the humans around him could have pressed harder on what that costs him.
It mostly does not. It resolves, it reconciles, and it sends everyone home fed.
That is a real achievement and a small disappointment at once. Ratatouille is a beautiful, funny, well-built film that stops one step short of the film it could have been — and the step it stops short of is the one Pixar’s best work takes.
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