"Anyone can cook": so goes the mantra of late master chef Auguste Gusteau, who once ruled the whole of French cuisine from his eponymous restaurant, but whose Paul Newman-ized visage now graces boxes of frozen food, and whose restaurant has been demoted from five-stars and haute rigeur to a tourist trap. Yet just as Ratatouille tempers this encouragement with a dose of reality (well, as much reality as a film about an anthropomorphic cooking rat can spare), so to does it stand as a testament to the fact that while anyone can make a movie, not everyone - or anyone, for that matter - can make a movie like Brad Bird.
Bird, you see, is a genius. His previous efforts - 1999's sorely underrated The Iron Giant and 2004's The Incredibles - marked him out as a filmmaker in full, an auteur rather than some faceless project manager; the nearest comparison I can make is to Stanley Kubrick, whose films also manifested the same obsessive eye for detail. Yet where Kubrick only seemed intermittently capable of, or interested in, creating empathetic characters (Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket spring to mind), Bird is clearly a humanist. His characters are full-blooded, three-dimensional, complex, with wants, needs, and desires that we can identify with: Mr. Incredible struggling to balance his responsibilities to his family (and his relationship with his wife) against the opportunity, however illusory, to realize his full potential; Remy's desire to cook allowing him to overcome an ingrained mistrust of humans and his limitations as, well, a rat.
Ratatouille is Bird's best film by far, a visual marvel of such heart and panache that transcends the kiddie ghetto condescension usually accorded animation and instead stands as not only one of the richest cinematic achievements of 2007, but surely one of the finest pop artworks of the young 21st century. The film is the story of Remy, a young rat besotted with a refined palette - a problem when your main source of nutrition is garbage - who dreams of becoming a chef. Forced to flee his country home and separated from his family, Remy finds himself in Paris, led by the specter of his idol Gusteau to the latter's restaurant, its former glory dimmed yet still resonant. It is here after much hijinx that Remy strikes up an unlikely partnership with a gawky plongeur improbably named Alfredo Linguini and the two set about whipping up dishes that put Gusteau's back on the map, and right in the cross hairs of sinister critic Anton Ego, setting up the film's climax, though far from its only conflict.
That the Pixar team has yet again outdone itself should surprise no one; the studio pioneered feature-length computer animation with 1995's Toy Story, and has not yet relinquished its lead. Ratatouille's characters are miraculously brought to life in a way that combines the expressive surreality of hand-drawn animation with such painstaking detail that you can almost hear their hearts beating; compare this to the dull, oddly vacant plasticity of Shrek. Furthermore the environments themselves are astonishing, bordering on photorealism - the kitchen alone, with its bright copper pots, gleaming knives, lush vegetables, and bubbling sauces is (pun intended) a feast for the eyes. Ratatouille's brilliant action set pieces - rats escaping on a makeshift flotilla, Remy ricocheting around Gusteau's kitchen, a chase along the banks of the Seine - are practically thrown gauntlets not only to Pixar's direct competitors but the whole of cinema: "Let's see you top this."
Though heaping laurels on Ratatouille is exhausting business I would be remiss if I failed to note the film's many fantastic vocal performances - especially Patton Oswalt, Jeneane Garofalo, Ian Holm, Brad Garrett, and Peter O'Toole. Unlike other similar animated ventures, Ratatouille is not a vehicle for any of these actors, and each plays his or her part with a conviction and professionalism so all-encompassing that they disappear in the characters, unrecognizable - with the exception of O'Toole, whose voice is such a distinctive dramatic instrument that it cannot, and should not, be concealed).
Speaking with Richard Corliss, Brad Bird voiced his frustration over the treatment he and his fellow animation directors receive in Hollywood:
We're kind of at the kids' table. If I do the most perfect job of directing [an animated feature] — in terms of composition, editing, how the performances come down on the screen — it's still the same thing [as directing live-action]. You're dealing with close-ups and editing and when to not cut and when to cut rapidly and was the music engaging and how do we know what the characters are thinking. [But] people disregard it. It's sort of an unspoken prejudice.As the critic Anton Ego notes towards the end of Ratatouille, "Not everyone can be a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." Bird's metier may prevent him from attaining the mainstream recognition as one of the current cinema's great realisateurs, but he shouldn't take it so hard. After all, when it comes to animated rodents, he's in pretty good company.
