Pixar may have dinted their unbroken run of success with the lacklustre Cars, but a new movie by them is still worth getting excited about, and especially when it’s the third film by director Brad Bird - whose CV so far includes The Simpsons, the under-seen The Iron Giant, and probably the greatest CG-animated picture yet produced, The Incredibles. At first glance, then, it’s a bit disappointing to see that for his second Pixar outing Bird has gone down the anthropomorphised animal route that has seemingly plagued computer-animated cinema since its inception.
Mainly for that reason, the trailer was underwhelming - we’ve had talking fish, bugs, ants, mammoths, hedgehogs, lions, sharks, cats, bears, pigeons, and more bloody penguins than you could shake a stick at, so we do we really need culinary rodents? Well, as it turns out, yeah, we do. Not only has Bird made another great movie, on a par with anything in Pixar’s back catalogue (if not quite up there with The Incredibles), he’s managed, in a totally appropriate way, to make something fresh from a handful of old and stale-seeming ingredients.
The story - following gastronomic rat Remy who, finding himself in Paris, makes a pact with beleaguered human Linguini whereby Remy gets to cook and Linguini to keep his job in a once-famous restaurant - has many of the same elements that have grown so tired elsewhere, and in lesser hands could have been very pedestrian. So what’s the difference? To some extent, it’s the usual Pixar touches that set Ratatouille apart. The animation is astonishing, far past anything they’ve achieved before and light-years beyond anything anyone else has done - it’s beautifully detailed, particularly dynamic in the numerous action sequences, and Bird makes great use of the sense of scale provided by having an inches-high protagonist. The voice cast are as good as usual, even if the range of accents popping up in a French restaurant is slightly confusing. Michael Giacchino’s jazzy score is also wonderfully appropriate, and far more satisfying than a Shrek-style string of bland pop tunes could hope to be.
But, like The Incredibles, Ratatouille stands out as something special even within the Pixar catalogue. Here as there, Bird has a knack for taking unexpected turns, so that despite a few predictable elements there are sufficient twists to keep the story interesting. It’s also nice that for once the protagonist being an animal actually matters, rather than being an excuse to discard plausibility - Remy looks and behaves like a rat, particularly in his interaction with humans, and of course it’s vital to the plot. First and foremost, though, what really separates Bird’s film is passion - the passion for good food that shines through in scene after scene, and with it the distinctly unDisneyesque moral that it’s okay to devote yourself to something you value, even when no-one understands or appreciates it. In the film’s world, cooking is available to anyone who cares enough, (Remy sustains himself with his favourite chef’s motto that “anyone can cook”), and it’s valuable not for its own sake but for its potential to move others. It’s easy to see that in a wider sense Bird is talking about any art here; and the love and care he and his team have put into Ratatouille amply proves his point.
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