Not as Incredible as "The Incredibles"

Rating: 7/10 (9 July 2007)

Wow. Number 51 on IMDb's top 250, huh? I thought "Ratatouille" was cute, but I didn't like it THAT much.
Pixar's latest boasts beautiful animation, perhaps the most accomplished yet, but the film as a whole never reached the inspired and dizzy heights attained by "The Incredibles," to my mind a small masterpiece. "Ratatouille" straddles an awkward and ambiguous line: a little too cartoony to be a completely adult film, but a little too sophisticated to be dismissed as a film for kids. It tells a warm and touching story about accepting differences and overcoming our preconceived prejudices, but I kept waiting for that unique brand of Pixar humour that never (or at least rarely) surfaced.
The best thing about this film is Peter O'Toole, who plays Anton Ego, a fearsome food critic who delivers a beautiful soliloquy at the film's climax that encourages people to embrace things that are new while still retaining the ability to discriminate between things that are quality and things that are not. The soliloquy also happens to sound beautiful as delivered in O'Toole's mellifluous voice.
In a food culture dominated by total crap like McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell (among others) I appreciated "Ratatouille"'s reminder that good, well-prepared food is a way to treat your body while so many people are poisoning theirs'. But I just didn't see the masterpiece here that so many others seem to.
Grade: B+