Starts O.K.

Rating: 5/10 (14 November 2007)

...but goes to pieces.
I appreciate that this was about a goal other than falling in love. The choice of a plot that introduces kids to a passion for food is fresh. The final development which portrays food as a gesture that invokes love & memory is very nice. The critics change of heart is poignant like the Grinch's.
Storywise, I can't accommodate why Linguini, who can't wait for a moment to monkey with the boiling soup, has to know absolutely nothing about cooking for the whole film. The two ideas are incompatible. The fraud storyline is not engaging. The movie is about twice as long as I'd prefer, due to dual protags whose stories need to receive development & resolution, but the usual psychodrama of earning a parents respect (Remy / rat) and believing in oneself (Linguini / human) must be a tiresome saw for kids, and adults have seen it a thousand times. The climax in which a swarm of rats gets the run of the kitchen of a French restaurant is over the top (and frankly kinda gross). All of this goes down while revisiting two of Disneys most exhausted, irritating mainstays; A) protagonists regardless of race/nationality will appear to be Caucasian Americans, and B) villains will always be foreign & physically extreme. Adding insult to injury is that there is a token black character in the kitchen who doesn't have a single line of dialog.
I'm not a big fan of Pixar's run of successful movies. Only Monsters Inc. did anything for me. I disliked Nemo in the extreme, and you couldn't lure me to go see Cars with a thousand dollar bill on fishing line. I also think the decision to drop flat animation was a mistake.