RATATOUILLE

2007

DIRECTOR(s): Brad Bird & Jan Pinkava

NOT A PART OF MY COLLECTION

Will we be adding this to our collection? NO

May Contain Spoilers!

2006/07 was defiantly the weakest period of Pixar. First there was Cars, which I simply didn’t get but I can understand how many did. Then there is Ratatouille. This film has so much wrong with it that I don’t know where to start. The film follows a rat who after growing up sampling rubbish, has a knack for blending food together to make it taste better. In short, he’s a chef! Fair enough, I get that.

The movement of the rats is inspired, blending real movement styles with the animated conceits needed to create characters, but that’s about it. Our rat, Remy, voiced by Patton Oswald, known mainly from U.S. Sitcom, King Of Queens, finds his way into a Parisian restaurant and meets a kitchen hand who can’t cook to save his life.

Remy manages, by hiding under his hat and pulling his hair to move the man like a marionette, (yeah, really!) to express his talent as a chef and let the boy take the credit. That’s pretty much it, beside the usual plot twists. The main problem here is that I just can’t get behind it. I find the concept difficult to accept and the rats look so good that the idea of a kitchen being used one of or more of them is just disgusting!

Overall, it is clear that Pixar’s the ideas were wearing thin and it took a change in direction in 2008 with Wall-e to bring the studio’s quality back up the par. Pixar are one of the best things to happen in animation since its inception but Cars and Ratatouille were the blip in their otherwise brilliant record.