truly devilish fun and mind-blowingly entertaining as classic cartoon style, but also very successful in storytelling- magnifique!

Rating: 10/10 (29 June 2007)

It's pretty easy to make little rodents charming and fun characters (just ask Disney himself, to a clichéd extent), but it's even harder to make them work in such a way that's original and exciting as comedy in conventional ways for today's audiences. But Brad Bird shouldn't be lumped into the group of today's CGI animators. He doesn't really think in those terms, but rather in how to make things look real, and yet at the same time keeping in full mind that it's a cartoon, not reality. This goes not simply for the rats themselves- the funniest, probably even funnier, that Disney's remotely had to market since the Great Mouse Detective- but the human characters too, who have their own distinct shapes and qualities based on personality and relevance to the story (whether they're good or bad, or maybe even more complex too). He places the designs for the characters right up there with the rest of the atmosphere, and then also adds in just the right way to make that wonderfully formulaic Pixar storyline- you know a lot of what may unfold, though not everything, and you know that you're in excellent hands because of the levels of detail and nuance in the comedy chaos at times. It'll be hard to beat this (to put it in a corny phrase) 'gourmet selection' as the best animated film of the year, and certainly the best that Pixar's done since, um, the last Brad Bird movie!
The story is the fish out of water, or in this case rat, where a little rodent named Remy, who is totally immersed in the style of Augustus Gusteau, a famous French chef who dies, and who's position is filled by a lowly garbageman named Linguini. He can't cook, of course, but somehow Remy, separated from his rat family, cooks something up on the spot as a not-quite accident, sending Linguini as the one who supposedly made it. On the fluke, he becomes the new chef at Gusteau's...only, the chef's a rat, literally, hilariously pulling Linguini's hair to make him a cooking puppet (early on this makes for some of the best physical comedy of any Pixar movie). This fluke becomes the start of the usual ball of string unraveled bit by bit, involving an heir to Gusteau's fortune, a love interest in aggressive chef Colette, and Remy's reconnection and estrangement from his huge rat clan and his father. All the while Bird throws in such dangerous and downright devilish comedy for a *G* rated animated movie. And there's morales to be learned too, or sort of taken away, I guess, only this time in the true Disney form instead of Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket, it's Remy and the, well, illusion of Gusteau's ghost appearing to him as a quasi-conscious.
What makes Ratatouille stand out of the pack from the fellow summer far of the moment, particularly 4th of July fare, is how there's such deft to Bird and his team navigating along the lines of making the comedy work to its excessive lengths while always keeping a firm grip on which turn the story will take next (the moments I didn't quite expect- the whole heir angle involving Linguini, and the climactic scenes with the rats preparing the restaurant's dinners, all washed before going to work, and keeping 'under wraps' the health inspector at the same time!). I probably laughed just as much during this film as I would at something much raunchier like Knocked Up or Grindhouse, to give recent examples, but as mentioned there's a riskiness to Bird's style here.
One scene I particularly loved is when Remy is training linguini to command the muscle-controlled hair pulling scheme at his home, and there's a build-up to what seems like a knife going to cut into his fingers while he's chopping vegetables (up to this point he's been hopeless in his training), but at this very point where we should expect the worst, which is funny unto itself, it starts to level out and he's sort of under control. Sort of in that he'll still be naturally clumsy enough to spill the wine on his own head. Same goes for little things like the quite silhouetted bit Remy passes by with the lover about to shoot the other and then falling into full embrace, or the actual fellow employees at Gusteau's, one of who has the wildest thumb ever shown in a movie, least of all a 'family' movie, that I can remember (albeit Bird does come out of working on the Simpsons).
So many masterstrokes of comedy go on that it's almost neglected to note how exciting a lot of the film is too, the run-around Remy has in the kitchen first time he comes in or the chase through Paris between the crooked head cook Skinner and Remy, and how seamless voice-work and the (now highly expected) advances in Pixar's technical innovations go together. It was a good guessing game who was the voice of Ego (it's O'Toole, but then it could be any given old regal British person), and to pick out that it's Ian Holm or Garofolo voicing some of the other parts, but it's not something that is immediately meant to be stand-out like in other CGI movies where it's being sold mostly on celebrity voice talent. It's almost like a lot of this comes quite naturally to Bird and his team, and yet because it isn't it reverts to becoming all the more remarkable. Ratatouille is simply an exceptionally fun picture, loaded with sight gags and puns and slips of behavior, and never overbearing with any of the usual messages that come pre-packaged for kids in these movies, all the more remarkable as it comes nearer to Pixar reusing previous ones.