RATATOUILLE
Featuring the voices of Patton Oswalt, Janeane Garofalo and Peter O’Toole; Written by Brad Bird, Jim Capobianco, Emily Cook, Kathy Greenberg and Jan Pinkava; Directed by Brad Bird; Rated G [nothing really inappropriate]
Demonstrating that the clunky Cars was just a fluke, Pixar comes back with this superb example of the kind of storytelling that made it great back in its Toy Story days. This one tells the, oh man…tail of Remy (Patton Oswalt), a French rat who is not so quick to live up to the stereotypes of his kind being filthy, non-discerning disease carriers. No, Remy wants to be a chef, and finds his opportunity with a bumbling kid named Linguini (Lou Romano), a low-level kitchen assistant in a once-great Paris restaurant. Their pairing is hilarious, comedy worthy of Chaplin or Keaton, in which the rodent perches atop the lad’s dome (under his toque blanche) and tugs on strands of the boy’s hair to make him do his culinary bidding. The usual line-up of top-notch voice talent adds to the variety of the mix, with Janeane Garofalo a treat as Linguini’s objet d’amour, Colette, and Peter O’Toole so absolutely dead-on as the feared food critic, Anton Ego (who sums up criticism of all stripes in a fantastic monologue). Director Brad Bird, who turned in the leanly inventive The Incredibles for Pixar in 2004, is largely responsible for everything working so well here, the best example being that the movie is close to two hours long, and we do not spend a moment checking the time or not smiling. He and his team do Aardman’s Flushed Away one better, concentrating on some pretty grown-up themes that defy its G rating without testing it. Visually, it is nearly seamless, and it portrays Paris as the vibrant city it is, all the while making us hungry for all the great food they tease us with. It is details like these that help us feel the passion that Bird and company have for what they are doing, too, even if it comes in the form of the love a rat has for his spice rack.•••
Read our interview with some of the team behind Ratatouille.