Another paycheck for Brad Bird

Rating: 2/10 (28 November 2007)

So I just watched Ratatouille on DVD. Like Incredibles, I dismissed this as another lame Pixar movie and saw Spidey 3 instead(big mistake).
But I gave Incredibles a chance and ended up enjoying it a little more than I thought. So I thought the same would happen with this movie. I was wrong.
The story was boring. Really boring. Boring and predictable. Boring, predictable, and way too long. Incredibles had a deep engaging story that kept me hooked. Ratatouille had two stories that went nowhere. Remy trying to realize his dreams of being a chef, and Linguini trying to realize his dream of not being a tool. It seemed like a good formula, well it would have if we haven't seen it in 2000+ other movies. And every 10 minutes they had to keep reminding us what's the plot of the story, because they were that bad at showing it.
The characters, oh god the characters. Flat and dull. They had no charisma, nothing unique about them, nothing that will make them stand out and join the ranks of greats like Bugs Bunny and Homer Simpson. Remy was just another big dreamer type. He works hard, get's knocked down, gets back up, and achieves his dream. Good for him, now what? He has the same backstory as about 1400 other Disney characters. And Linguni, the dude was a loser. A total loser, and he's stays that way through the entire film, and yet somehow he still get's to make it with the big-nosed chick. What was he there for? His only purpose was to make Remy look good. People say Linguini had very unique movements, but all he did was spin around a lot. What's unique about that. He had no personality, and he flaunted it. And obviously his voice actor didn't even care enough to try to make him at least sound interesting. Colette, she claimed to be a tough and sassy girl in a"man's kitchen", yet all she did was fall for the biggest loser in France. Where's her self-esteem, they did absolutely nothing with her character. It's like Pixar isn't even trying to make us care about these characters. They're one-note and easily forgettable, soon to be pushed aside for the next bland set of characters, then the cycle begins anew. And my apologies to Patton Oswalt, he's one of my favorite comedians and people in general, but the voice acting was terrible. Flat and emotionless. They honestly couldn't just get guys like Billy West and Rob Paulsen. They would have made the movie 10x more interesting.
Even with the great story and characters of the Incredibles, the animation still kept the movie bogged down. Ratatouille was no different. Everything felt so mechanical, so chained down. It didn't feel fun and exciting. It just made me wonder if they weren't gonna put any effort into trying to make the animation fun, lively, and surreal, why the hell didn't they do it in live action. All it had was just some fancy camera angles, thinking that would compensate, well, it didn't. Pixar strives too hard to make they're animation look more realistic, so much so that it loses another key component, believability(spell check). They have these uber realistic atmosphere and these ultra-fake looking humans, that it clashes and makes the movie look even more fake than it is. It doesn't suck you into the world they've created, it spits you out maliciously. One of the things I liked about the movie TMNT, they built this dark, gritty, comic style atmosphere and built it around the characters, and it worked, you were in that movie, it was believable. Ratatouille wasn't.
Ultimately, I'm not surprised little kids like the movie, it was geared toward them, and they're the only ones who could enjoy it. All the adults that are saying this is the best movie ever, needs to retrieve their souls from Walt Disney's cold dead hands