RootsRain

Emily and I went to the theater last night to see Ratatouille. It won’t actually be out in theaters until June 29, but I got some free tickets from work to see an advance screening. So Emily and I packed a PB&J dinner and drove out to the Perimeter on our “free date night.” It was like being little kids… we drove in a green Bug, ate PB&J, stood in line with about 150 “other” kiddos, and watched a kids’ movie.

Well, maybe it’s not entirely a kids’ movie. Pixar doesn’t make movies for a single demographic unless that demographic is “people who enjoy good, clean, 3D-animated movies.”

Ratatouille starts off with a hilarious little film short (“Lifted”) starring a sleeping bumpkin and two globular aliens. It was quite funny, especially when the bumpkin got stuck in the window. Enough said. I don’t want to spoil anything.

Ratatouille actually opened a bit slow. Well, besides the opening scene of crashing out of the window with a shotgun blast close behind… I mean the plot took a little while to get moving because there was a lot of character and circumstance introduction at the beginning. But things pick up once Remy (the rat main character) gets to Paris and I spent a lot of time just staring stupidly at the screen with a look of delight and wonder on my face. A lot of the movie wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny. But the whole thing was a feast to watch. I was struck again with how amazingly well Pixar can animate; with how well they nail those water effects, the lighting, the physics of tossed shrimp sautéeing in a pan.

They also did a good job of coming up with a synesthetic way of depicting what different foods taste like by fading the background to black and animating abstract shapes and colors in response to what the character was eating—somewhat like the visual sounds from the original Fantasia.

There were a few plot devices that seemed a bit stretched… the recurring ghost-imagination-hallucination-conscience-whatever of the departed Gusteau, the hair-brained (sorry… I had to say that) device where Remy could control Linguini (the hapless garbage boy at Gusteau’s Restaurant) via yanking on his hair like heavy equipment controls (although that did lead to a lot of hilarious moments, like Linguini constantly holding ingredients to his head so that Remy could smell them to test for freshness—Remy was inside Linguini’s hat). But generally the plot devices weren’t distracting.

The film really seems to pick up about half way through and the audience was laughing pretty much non-stop after that. Capers were coming so fast, yet perfectly-timed, at the end that it was reminiscent of some of the best scenes from Toy Story 2 (the elevator scene, the drive in the pickup truck).

Ratatouille is, like all other Pixar films, high on moral tone. In this film, the “morals” were: stealing is always wrong, revenge is unsatisfying and makes everything worse, friendship requires sacrifices, giving or making is better than taking, really good and beautiful things can break down even the most rigid barriers, and that people should learn to appreciate goodness even from unexpected places. There were actually a few points in the movie where I was thinking “this is awfully overt morality… way to go!” In other places, I was thinking “I wonder if Brad Bird’s a Christian because some of this sounds distinctly metaphorical for something biblical…”—like when Linguini tries to explain how Remy has been the genius chef controlling his movements and that everything good they see in Linguini is actually Remy controlling him; or when he tells the other cooks that just because the truth sounds insane, doesn’t mean it’s any less the truth.

To sum up, Emily and I really enjoyed Ratatouille and, if I had to rank it in Pixar’s canon, I’d have to place it somewhere maybe below Monsters, Inc. but definitely above Cars or Bug’s Life. It’s probably right about the level of The Incredibles, which makes sense because Brad Bird directed that one, too. It does have a few weak seams where the plot devices show through, but overall it’s a funny, well-crafted movie with a good story.

★★★★