REVIEW: Ratatouille

30Jun07

Pixar has done it again. That’s how you can really sum up my final reaction to their newest flick, Ratatouille. After finding success with their most recent flicks Cars, The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo, you’d think they would at least have one film in their lineup that wasn’t good.

Well, that’s not the case with Pixar. This movie is just as amazing as the three I just listed above. I’m glad that Pixar realizes that you don’t have to use a giant green ogre (over and over again) to have success in the computer animation world. Hopefully another animation company will take note.

Ratatouille (Rat-a-too-ee) is the story of a rat named Remy, who has a remarkable sense of smell and making things taste good. Where his family likes garbage, Remy is more of a “gourmet” kind of rat, where everything has to be cooked to perfection. He won’t eat garbage–instead, he sneaks into an older woman’s house and steals good food from her. He has one aspiration–to become a chef. He follows the advice of a dead French chef named Gusteau to guide him along the way.

After the old woman discovers that there’s millions of rats living in her house, she goes crazy and all of the rats leave. Remy gets separated from his family, where he finds himself in the heart of Paris. After following Gusteau (the dead guy) to his restaurant, Remy is discovered making a soup by a young, lanky, clumsy kid named Linguini. It turns out that the customers in the restaurant love the soup, and Linguini’s boss thinks it was he who created the soup.

Linguini then becomes a chef in the restaurant, with help from Remy, who teaches Linguini how to cook (take note: Remy cannot talk to Linguini, as it would destroy the barrier between human and rat communication). After the restaurant becomes popular again, a famous French critic named Alton Ego (played by Peter O’ Toole) decides to re-evaluate the restaurant (he caused it to go from a five-star restaurant to a three-star restaurant). Of course, I don’t want to spoil the rest of it, so you’ll just have to go see it to find out more.

The plot of the movie is amazing, if what I wrote above wasn’t enough. The movie uses themes such as love and friendship to get by–exactly what you’d expect in Paris. The way it was all pulled together really works out to an advantage.

As far as the animation goes in this movie, it was absolutely amazing–the way Pixar portrays Paris in this movie is breathtaking. The lighting at night, the character design, the “set” design…it’s all so perfect. Its obvious that Pixar put a very long time into creating this one.

If you’re looking for a good time at the movies (as I always say), then Ratatouille is for you. Its good fun, its funny, and its just an overall good experience from the studio that brought you Finding Nemo. I really hope to see Ratatouille somewhere else someday, whether it be a restaurant at Disney-MGM Studios, or a ride of some form…this one is great. I give it a 9.5/10.

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