Animated films seem to thrive on implausibility. Consider, if you will, a wooden puppet who not only can be transformed into a "real boy" if he behaves himself, but who can survive — along with his companions — being swallowed by a whale (there's a precedent for that particular premise, I know, but bear with me). Or consider the case of a baby elephant who can fly — using his ears for wings.
You get the idea. I bring all this up only because the fabulously inspired and inventive Brad Bird, along with many fabulously inspired and inventive collaborators, has, perhaps inspired by the forebears described above, set his improbability bar very high. With Ratatouille, they not only want you to fall in love with a little blue-gray rat — yes, that's rat, not mouse, because if there's one thing that Disney, the parent company of this film's producer Pixar, knows, it's that everybody loves a mouse. A rat? Not so much — but they want you to believe that you would enjoy this rat's cooking as well.
Yeah, yech — a rat that cooks? But that's the whole point. Remy, voiced by Oswalt, is a rodent in the French provinces who, in his foraging, falls under the spell of popular TV chef Gasteau (Garrett). In a plot point that indicates that Bird and/or his co-story-writers Jim Capobianco, Emily Cook, Kathy Greenberg, and Jan Pinkave have been following the tragedies and intrigues surrounding certain Michelin Guide ratings in recent years, Gasteau passes away after being stripped of a star by merciless restaurant critic Anton Ego (a really beautiful turn by O'Toole). This knowledge comes to Remy — who can understand English, read it, and speak it to his rat family but can't communicate it to humans (ah, the "logic" that cartoons can get away with!) — just as he and his brood get blown, and then flooded, out of their pastoral paradise and into … Paris! The city that the Gasteau-inspired Remy has long dreamed of. After all, Gasteau's motto was "Anyone can cook." And once Remy insinuates himself under the chef's hat of restaurant clean-up boy Linguini (Lou Romano), gains the confidence of the culinarily clueless boy, and turns him into a sort-of chef via hair-pulling remote control, Remy proves the axiom, creating new dishes that wow the diners at Gasteau's and infuriate its new majordomo Skinner (Holm).
This is some set-up, and it's not all. Linguini and Remy have to contend with the hostility of kitchen veteran Colette (Garofalo), who's trying to teach Linguini something about cooking; later, when Linguini's a star, Remy and Linguini battle over how much of the truth she should know. Then there's a will involving a claim of the restaurant's ownership, a mystery as to the boy Linguini's real identity, a hiccup when Remy's rat family finally tracks him down, a climactic impending visit to the restaurant by the imposing critic Ego, and much, much more.
The varied plot complications get juggled like it ain't nothing; deftly enough, in fact, that one might be so diverted by said juggling that, say … one might not even notice what an amazing leap Pixar computer animation has made since Cars. The design and tech teams make the rats here look genuinely adorable yet real, down to their every stray hair and whisker; the sheen of the Paris streets is almost as intoxicating as the city itself on a bright dewy morning. The slapstick-comic set pieces involving Remy and Linguini's cooking struggles might solicit the admiration of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. The scene in which the churlish critic Ego confronts an astutely assessed concoction à la Remy is one of the most hilarious and memorable moments of epiphany any cinema, animated or not, has offered in recent years. This is a movie that's pretty hard — unfairly hard, I should say — on critics, if you wanna know. That I forgive it for that should tell you something.
Finally, and not that I want to be a buzzkill or anything, Ratatouille is, in its improbable way, a lovely and heartfelt parable about real-world tolerance and acceptance. Anyone can cook, indeed.
READ MORE: Critic's Choice: Best of 2007
VIEW FILM STILLS: Ratatouille
