And it's interesting enough that the movie itself is indeed a Ratatouille......The similarity between the two is strikingly uncanny.
Pourquoi???
The word "Ratatouille" means simply an ordinary cuisine with assorted vegetables mixing together, nothing high-class or fancy. Like its name, the movie itself is a simple enough story with various different cinematic elements (romance, drama, action, suspense and comedy) added and mixed together. Voila!
However, the quality of the cuisine depends on the creativity and the craft of the Chef (or Remy the Mouse in this case) while the success of the movie rests on the shoulder of the director Brad Bird, who brought us the incredible "The Incredibles" 2 years ago.
Brad Bird's sense of humour and creativity is beyond question, as evident from The Simpsons TV series in which he acted as the Executive Consultant for years. This time, in Ratatouille, he wrote a very simple plot involving a mouse trying to use his cooking talent to be a top chef. Like making cuisine, Brad Bird did make this movie whole-heartedly, with extremely delicate execution and obsessive attention to details. As a result, in the movie, we marvel at the absolutely gorgeous graphics, and are stunned by the breathtakingly realistic Paris streets and landscapes. Besides, all the gags and punch lines are great and with appropriate effects, leaving the audience immensly entertained.
Furthermore, in the movie, he smartly used the icon of Disney as the lead character of this movie to carry on the great tradition of the deceased Walt Disney, who inspired lots of the talented young animation artists like what Gusteau did to Remy. This is an openly respectable tribute to the late Walt Disney from Brad Bird, and at the same time, with some bold criticism directed to the present Disney Empire who now is concentrating on mainly cashing out through exhaustive merchandising.
For me, after seeing the movie, I have very mixed feelings about it. While I found it a great feast to the eyes and most of the time laughed my ass off, I feel that it didn't live up to my expectation. It is better than Cars, which in my opinion, is the worst production by Pixar so far. However, it cannot exceed the success of Finding Nemo or The Incredibles.
Pourqoui???
Just like the cuisine Ratatouille, without the garnishing, the spices and the gravy, it's just some cheap and ordinary vegetables putting together. The movie distracts us from the slim cliche plot and a few superficial characters with the grandeur visuals, hilarious dialogues, exciting chasing scenes, etc. And I also think that it suffers majorly from the excessive length of screening time, together with inconsistent pace, making some scenes dragging to nearly stagnant, notably the first hour.
Also, most of the characters were under-developed. Besides Remy and Linguini, the others are uni-faceted and not at all memorable, serving as kind of like show-and-go sort of a comic relief. The creation of the imaginary friend Gusteau is somehow childish and even cliche. Colette's romance with Linguini is somehow predictable yet not convincing enough. The evils (Skinner and Anton) are not too intimidating or persuasive and so pose not much challenge at all to the leads, making the final act of resolution a bit simple and unsatisfying.......
And what's less than satisfying is the explicit morals and messages of the movie. They almost tell us the lesson of the day word by word, thus insulting the audience. The final long speech by the food critic is particularly unbearable. Though putting this in at the end is a smart move, because it will shut the mouths of all the movie critics from bad-mouthing it, like the case of the Emperor's new clothes!
Well, since I'm not a critic, I'm immuned from that. "Surprise me" no more, I have to say that for a Pixar movie, Ratatouille overall gets only a passing mark. However, among the animated movies this year so far (I haven't seen the Simpsons Movie yet), I still recommend it to anyone who loves animation and is young at heart.
