Good, unclean, unsavoury fun

Rating: 8/10 (12 October 2007)

Another year, another dazzlingly animated, flawlessly directed and engagingly characterful palate-tickler from the masterchefs at Pixar.
And yet however cute, cuddly and hand-washingly obsessive you make them, rats are rats. So while you're delighting in Remy's antics, remember that he came straight from the sewer. Rats  kitchens  wrong. What next? The adventures of Eddie the friendly E. coli bacterium who just wants to be a heart surgeon?
Issues of taste aside, where The Incredibles and Toy Stories were laugh-out-loud funny, Ratatouille is constantly  but never more than - amusing. And though they're all French, why do certain characters have American accents while others don't (most noticeably Linguini, who comes across like David Schwimmer's Ross Gellar with ginger hair)?
Ah rats, I should probably just shut up and heed the words of Peter O'Toole's marvellous, cadaverous Anton Ego. He nails the role of the critic perfectly.