Botched up opportunity

Rating: 3/10 (22 October 2007)

Pixar took a great theme - cooking - and botched it up. There is so little film work done on this subject, less funny work, that one would have thought of a kitchen-based cartoon as a, well... pot of ideas.
Well, they did it, didn't they? The movie starts with a rat learning of the pleasures of good food and running into the dilemma of "creating vs stealing". The plot is vague about what exactly makes him a gourmand and how creating food is ethically counterpoised to stealing it (after all, as a rat you still can't get away from stealing the ingredients for your cooking), but we are presenting with both as facts. After a bizarre incident involving a gun-toting granny and an underground sewer pipe he gets separated from the rest of the colony and relocated to Paris, where he takes refuge in a restaurant, previously owned by a now-dead chef, whose ghost is haunting him. He also runs into a kid of little apparent intelligence, who has no clue and no interest in cooking, and whose ambitions are pretty much limited to keeping his job sweeping the kitchen floor. The rat eventually manipulates the kid (through a combination of reflex hair-pulling and blackmailing) to create the best soup ever. The rest of the movie, the rat - through the zombie kid - is battling against the evil manager, ugly food critics, and the rat colony that resurfaces in Paris, to reach culinary stardom.
Theme: Cooking is presented as some kind of magic with boolean outcomes: a little less marjoram - disaster, a little more - culinary sensation. Anyone able enough make scrambled eggs will tell you that this nonsense neither helps add realism to a movie centered on a very realistic subject, nor presents cooking as a fun theme.
Plot: Confused at best. Stupid at worst - talk about zombying the kid by pulling his hair. The love affair between the kid and the assistant chef girl is ludicrous - neither was even looking forward to it.
Character development: Poor. At the end of the movie we are left with a rat who likes cooking, and a host of other characters about whom we know absolutely nothing other that some are "good", some are "bad" and some are neither. Critically for a cartoon, none of them is funny.
Language: "Little chef"??? Who came up with this? The French accent imitation is the worst of so many a French-inspired movies.
Animation: Quite good, but what is animation alone in a movie that lacks in so many other respects? The movie earns a generous "3".
In the future, how about coming up with a decent plot and hiring a bunch of French comedy actors who actually know stuff about cooking? Gerard Depardieu (he just came up with a cook book of his own) or perhaps Jean Reno?