It's all about the CGI

Rating: 5/10 (23 April 2012)

This isn't a movie, it's a very long children's cartoon. It's more like a Warner Brothers cartoon than Disney. In a Warner Bros. cartoon, like Road Runner or Bugs Bunny, logic and laws of the physical world are thrown out the window, and anything can happen if it's convenient for the plot. They, like Ratatouille, are well-suited to the ADHD crowd, at least for five minutes or so. But 111 minutes?
The biggest problem is I didn't really care about the characters. I don't think the producers did, either. Look at the credits: It's all about the them and the animators; the characters and their human voices don't show up for two and a half minutes. I have never, ever seen such an insult to actors in any movie credits!
We're supposed to like this because it's got really slick CGI animation. Well, frankly, CGI doesn't work for me, at least to the extent I am thinking about it. All it does is make me feel that I am being manipulated artificially. Now, Charlotte's Web did work, and I really cared about Templeton the rat, but I stopped thinking about the CGI because I was drawn into the story. And Bambi still breaks my heart.
I guess we're supposed to be really impressed by what CGI hath wrought, and maybe the current generation is. Most reviewers' frame of reference seems to be either Pixar or recent Disney animations. But there was very good animation before CGI, even back in the 1930s and 40s, especially Disney's Bambi, Snow White, and Pinocchio. There were some very well animated cartoons in the old days, before they started cutting corners and you got jerky, artificial looking motion on scrolling backgrounds; even The Simpson's isn't as well animated as many older cartoons. CGI doesn't make it better; it makes it cheaper.
The reason this story didn't work is because it was founded on too much sleight of hand. The rat wants to be a cook, but has never made much of anything besides combining cheese and strawberries, or mushroom and cheese. Yet, poof! suddenly he's a genius master chef, the greatest in Paris.
The kid shows up in one of the greatest restaurants in Paris and wants to cook, yet he has no experience and no talent. Even someone with qualifications is going to start washing pots and pans, as part of an apprenticeship. And we are supposed to be shocked that he starts as the "trashboy"? Tant pis.
So the rat, with no experience takes over for the kid with no talent, and suddenly 1 + 1 = 1 in a million.
Now, I'm willing to suspend disbelief for a story about a rat who wants to be a chef, but the filmmaker is going to have to meet me halfway. Obviously, it's a fantasy, and apparently it's good enough to work for kids. But to work for adults you can't throw all plausibility of plot out the window, or it's just a bunch of cartoon characters running around on the screen. Or perhaps I should say caricatures. There is absolutely no depth to any of the characters, at least beyond the rat.
Ratatouille was mildly entertaining, but the ending left me entirely unmoved; indeed, now that I think about it, none of it was emotionally moving. As I watched it, I kept asking myself how I would respond to it if these were human characters? And the answer was, without the slick CGI animation, there wasn't any beef. If I were to sum up the movie in two words it would be "mostly boring."
CGI? Who cares?