Adorable; More Chase Scenes than Development; All Male

Rating: 7/10 (1 July 2007)

"Ratatouille" is adorable. Remy, the lead character, a rat gourmet cook, is noble, sweet, and endearing.
The animation is top notch: beautiful, detailed, appearing to be three dimensional. Paris was never lovelier.
I laughed several times, and even cried once, when a character is served a meal that brings back memories of his childhood.
There is one chase scene after another. The rat is menaced by much larger human beings; he escapes. This is repeated several times.
Given all the chase scenes, there isn't much time left for character development. Linguini, a cook, announces he is in love; when did that happen? And Remy, though the main character, does not grow or change at all. He cooks; he escapes; he cooks; he escapes.
All these chase scenes leave little room for the kind of magic, time out of time moments found in cartoon classics: the dance in the ballroom from "Beauty and the Beast," the spaghetti dinner or "midnight howl" from "Lady and the Tramp," the dance of the mushrooms from "Fantasia."
The villain, Skinner, a short, dark-skinned, cook, is uninteresting. His major crime seems to be promoting fast food. "Supersize Me" did a much better job of skewering fast food. There are a lot of truly terrifying cartoon villains out there: Cruella de Ville, the witch queen in "Snow White." Skinner is not in their class.
Skinner is a nice name for a villain, here. Skinner is, of course, the last name of B. F. Skinner, the behaviorist famous for experimenting on rats, and for his book title, "Beyond Freedom and Dignity."
Brad Bird, who also wrote "The Incredibles," favors excellence and individuality, themes that run counter to Skinner's theories. So, his bad guy is named "Skinner," a very un-French name in a Parisian setting.
"Ratatouille," like too many animated films, is a man's world. There is only one female character, and she is underdeveloped.
I loved the beauty of this film's animation, but it isn't a classic, to me. There just aren't those moments where the action stops, and I get in touch with the heart and soul of a living, growing, character. And the all-male Paris -- both its rats and its humans are viritually all male -- is too grim in its obvious message.