Ratatouille (2007)

Remy has a dream of becoming a chef in a fancy restaurant in Paris, but there is a slight problem, Remy is a rat. This poses a problem until he is meet and befriended by Linguini the garbage boy at Gusteau's. Linguini has no talent for cooking. When Remy fixes a soup that Linguini has ruined everyone thinks he did it and he is promoted to cook. Hilarity ensues when Linguini (with Remy's help) starts to be noticed for his food and he starts to fall in love with Colette who helps him get started. Meanwhile Remy struggles with his family who thinks he should stay away from humans and be satisfied with the food they can steal. Will Remy, Linguini, and Colette be able to save the restaurant from a bad review by the infamous critic Anton Ego who could doom them with one stroke of his typewriter.

Trivia: The animation team worked alongside chef Thomas Keller at his restaurant French Laundry in order to learn the art of cooking. Mr. Keller also appears in a cameo role as the voice of a patron at Gusteau's. Michael Warch, the manager of sets and layout, holds a culinary degree. Several changes to the design of the rats (primarily the nose and ears) were made after Debbie Ducommun, a rat expert, brought down several of her personal pets for the art and animation departments to observe. To create a realistic looking compost pile, artists photographed and researched the way real produce rots. Fifteen different kinds of produce were left to rot and then photographed, such as apples, berries, bananas, mushrooms, oranges, broccoli and lettuce. To find out how to animate the scene where the chef is wet, they actually dressed someone in a chef suit, and put him in a swimming pool to see which parts of the suit stuck to his body, and which parts you could see through.

If you know me you know that I love Pixar. So some of you are probably wondering why I haven't reviewed Pixar's new Ratatouille yet. After all, it did open on Friday. Well, I was out Letterboxing with the parental units over the weekend and having a great time (the world is not just movies after all) so I didn't see it until last night. Wow, it was great. The story is heartwarming. The characters are entertaining. The voices aren't annoying. One of the things I like about Pixar films is that the story drives the movie and they don't stoop to adding pop culture references and highly recognisable voices. Let's take, for instance, oh, I don't know, Shrek The Third. It is a fun movie sure, but in 20 years will kids watch it and be able to get all the pop culture that is soprevalent in just about every scene. And Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers did great jobs bringing Donkey and Shrek to life, but you still sit in the theater thinking, hey, that's Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers. Ratatouille is different. It is classically told and the voices were picked to fit the characters and they do. I purposefully left out the names of the actors who voiced the characters in the ploy summary above because you can have just as much fun watching without knowing as you would by knowing. Another thing that I loved was the fact that Remy couldn't talk to Linguini, he had to gesture or tail slap or even sometimes bite Linguini to get his point across. All to many times in these so called children's movies, they resort to having the animal speak English. Although Remy does talk, the humans only hear squeaking. Oh yeah, Pixar's Paris is absolutely beautiful.