RATATOUILLE
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: RATATOUILLE has an engaging enough premise,
but does not really have a good story to tell. The
first third of the film is much more engaging than
the remainder. The furry rat who is the main
character is expressive and winning, but the human
characters do not give him much support and the story
pulls in too many directions. Rating: high +1
(-4 to +4) or 6/10
Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) was born with a taste for the
finer things in life. He knows food and not only has a highly
cultured palette; he has a supernatural talent for cooking French
haute cuisine. You can just tell that Remy is headed for a lot
of frustration since he is, after all, a rat, and kitchens are
off limits to rats. Most people who see a rat in a kitchen
immediately go after it with a cleaver or sometimes a shotgun.
Remy's chances of ever getting to test his talents in a kitchen
seem small, but hey, this is a cartoon. A chain of events chases
Remy away from a farmhouse kitchen and washes him into a storm
drain and out again. He finds himself in the center of Paris and
at the very foundation of the restaurant founded by Remy's hero,
the famous Chef Gusteau. But Remy still has to overcome the
whole rat-in-a-kitchen problem. Luckily the garbage boy at
Gusteau's discovers Remy. Linguini (Lou Romano) has been hired
reluctantly by the tyrannical Chef Skinner (Ian Holm) on the
specific proviso that Linguini never tries to cook. But Remy can
cook using Linguini as his hands.
The story of RATATOUILLE is a good cut beneath previous
Pixar/Disney animation films. It almost feels as though whenever
writer/director Brad Bird could not figure out how to make the
plot work, he added a contrivance or a coincidence to push the
plot along. Remy idolizes Chef Gusteau and a flood and a storm
drain contrive to deposit him in Paris exactly at the chef's
restaurant. How can a rat silently direct Linguini's cooking?
Well, it just turns out that Linguini has a peculiar muscular
reflex that no other human has ever had, but it turns out to be
just precisely what Remy needs to run the show. At various
points various people know that Gusteau's restaurant has what
appears to be a rat problem. Only one person does anything about
it, and that is unrealistically insufficient. Yet Gusteau's
Restaurant's fine reputation is never damaged. This is a film
that has too many bad guys doing too many different things. The
bad chef is victimizing Linguini while the bad critic is
victimizing the restaurant. A villain is vanquished two-thirds
the way into the film in what seems like a big climax, but he
still hangs around threateningly without doing very much. There
is a romance, but neither the boy nor the girl is particularly
likable.
A film like this needs a nice well-defined plot. FINDING NEMO, a
previous Pixar/Disney film, had a clear, clean plot. Nemo is
taken and the film is about the how Nemo is rescued. RATATOUILLE
does not have such a clear plot. Remy wants to cook and eat what
he cooks. Linguini is not sure what he wants other than to hold
onto his job and get the girl. Chef Skinner is nasty and may
want to be rid of Linguini, but his chief goal does not clearly
connect with the main characters. The villainous, egotistical
critic just wants people to know where to get good food and is
willing to be a little sarcastic along the way. That actually
should help Linguini and Remy, not threaten them.
RATATOUILLE is funny and imaginative. I will not say the
animation is great, not because it isn't, but because *every*
Pixar film has great animation and breaks new ground. The visual
element is very fine, but the script was frequently unsatisfying.
On balance it is a good film and I rate it a high +1 on the -4 to
+4 scale or 6/10. As is becoming the custom with animated
releases, RATATOUILLE comes packaged with a supporting cartoon.
In this case it is "Lifted", in which an incompetent teenager-
like alien tries to abduct a human with a levitation beam. It
was funny enough, though younger children in the audience were
asking why aliens would kidnap humans, and come to think of it so
was I.
Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0382932/>
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper.TakeThisOut@optonline.net
Copyright 2007 Mark R. Leeper
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