“There’s nothing worse that seeing a film about football where the quarterback is wearing number 91,” says Ratatouille producer Brad Lewis of CGI touchstone Pixar, “or a golf movie where it’s obvious that the guy never swung a club.”

Lewis’s movie is not about football or golf, but authenticity is key to believing that a French rat named Remy (Patton Oswalt) is the greatest chef in Paris.

To help pull off such a detail oriented feat, it helps to have a creative crew headed by someone with a reputation for unrelenting dedication to quality and vision. That someone was Brad Bird, whose first two films, The Iron Giant (1999) and The Incredibles (2004), have become critical and audience favorites, for both the their richness and for being anything but cartoonish.

“I know enough to go into any single area and explain what’s missing and what I need,” director Bird explains. “The heads of each department know best how, and it is the job of the director to have some sort of overview of the things that are important to pursue.”

Because an animated film takes so much time, as it takes 24 drawings for a single second of action, that makes for a whole lot of production time, whether the production is computer-rendered, like Ratatouille, or freehand, like the movies that Bird cut his teeth on when he was an animator for Disney in the 1980s.

“You only have X amount of time and resources,” Bird notes, “so if you got every single thing perfect-perfect-perfect, it would take five or six years to produce, so eventually, you have to finish. Even a painter will tell you that working on a painting too much can ruin it.”

“Deadlines make for good creative invention,” Lewis says, “and Brad knows what’s essential to communicate.”

Essential in helping the two Brads communicate to an audience was the right voice cast, especially their lead rodent.

“Patton was perfect for this part,” Bird says of the 38-year-old stand-up comedian, “and this was a difficult part to cast. We had a lot of people in on it, and nothing seemed quite right until him.”

“I guess Brad Bird heard my first album and said, ‘That’s the voice — you’re the guy,” Oswald says.

Bird would not have heard the album, however, if he had not been a fan of the liberal radio network, Air America, where he was a fan of Janeane Garofalo, who was at the time on Worcester native Sam Seder’s daily show. Bird cast Garofalo as the (human) female lead, Colette, and while neither Oswalt nor Garofalo are name-above-the-title commodities, that has never been the way that Disney’s Pixar has done things.

“Casting at Pixar is all about who is the right voice,” Lewis says, “as opposed to who’s a star.”

As talented as both Oswalt and Garofalo might be in coming up with material on the spot, they did not let loose, à la Robin Williams, and improvise dialogue.

“It’s impolite to change dialogue like that, because they are animating at the same time,” says Garofalo, who also lent her voice to Disney’s poorly received 2006 CGI comedy, The Wild. There was still a challenge for her, though, as she had to pull off a convincing French accent.

“The French accent made me nervous,” she says. “I don’t speak French, and I learned the accent entirely by listening to a CD of a French gentleman speaking English.”

Despite the Roquefort-solid performances by the voice cast, which also includes Brad Garrett, Ian Holm and Peter O’Toole, perhaps even more credit should go to the animators.

“Even if you shut off the dialogue, you should be able to see what the characters are feeling,” Bird says. “People don’t pay enough attention to animators; they are really good performers.”

While Bird, who says he is “known for being persnickety and staying with a scene,” is known for his dedication to a vision for every project he takes on, it is not a maniacal one.

“I’d love to say that I have this perfect vision that’s right every time, but I don’t,” he says. “If others can give you something different than what you’re asking, I’ll be the first to say, ‘Man, that’s perfect — why didn’t I see that?’ That’s why you have creative people on your crew.”•••