Rat in mi kitchen

Rating: 8/10 (7 April 2012)

This has to be one of Pixar's finest and funniest features to date. While even now,I struggle to get my head fully around enjoying a film where a kitchen is invaded by rats to the extent that they at one point prepare and serve all the food in a top restaurant, even my natural hygienic revulsion was overcome in the end. What next, a playful killer shark with ideas on how to boost tourism at a holiday resort or a friendly viper who helps weed the garden...?
Anyway, the setting of Paris gives the studio the chance to, in more ways than one, broaden its horizons, with new, funny characterisations, French locations and also interiors, from a five-star restaurant and its working kitchen to Linguini's shabby (later luxurious) Eiffel Tower-facing apartment. The storytelling skill and joke-count are as high as ever, but for me it's the detail in the art-work which impresses most.
Of course, being an animated feature, means that the director can take a shot from any vantage point, but even so I was frequently surprised by the sheer audacity of some of the set-ups and edits which certainly kept me interested and helped the movie negotiate its sometimes tricky dual-plot line format. The film at first seems to reach a natural ending prematurely with the initial success of Linguini (and Remy) so that the coda of their having to convert the sternest critic in Paris could have seemed contrived and padded but the single scene where he's won over is probably the best in the movie and justifies the extra half-hour for the more muted but still happy ending.
I'm normally not a fan of celebrity voice-overs in cartoon films (give the work to jobbing actors!) but even I enjoyed Peter O'Toole's star turn as the glacial critic who turns, but in truth he's no better than the rest of the cast in giving life to their pixilated creations.
Being a Disney film, of course there has to be an element of playing to the young and so we get the usual sub-plot pitting a sort of bad-guy head-chef against our hero and the usual pick-and-mix of uplifting morals for all, but it's none too blatant and never a distraction.
In short, this was a highly entertaining family feature, although I personally pity the parents of young children who on seeing this film will be pestered to buy them a pet rat for their birthday or Christmas!