06-19-07 Ratatouille Review

[Chuck Oberleitner]

Ratatouille: A Four-Star Film From a Five-Star Studio
By C. W. Oberleitner
June 19, 2007

With Disney/Pixar sneaking it’s eagerly anticipated summer CG-animated flick Ratatouille in 800 theatres last weekend, and a seemingly equal number of invitation-only screenings for web-mavens from Endicott to Emeryville, its fair to say that the rat is definitely out of the bag.

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[animagusurreal]

Mr. O,



I enjoyed your review, however, I have a few comments on your assertion about the characters' motivations, or lack thereof - I thought that the motivations were more than usually well-established for any film, but especially for an animated film:

The movie depicts the rats as having human intelligence, and Remy as being unusually intelligent for his society. He probably learned English/French from watching the TV, and reading from reading the cookbook. He is probably physically incapable of speaking like a human, despite the fact that he can understand them. Also, we'd miss out on an awful lot of cute pantomime if he could just speak to Linguini, we wouldn't have a movie at all if he couldn't understand Linguini, and the plot would never move if the movie stopped to explain everything.

Ego's disdain for Gusteau's cooking seemed to stem from his disdain for Gusteau's message, "anyone can cook." Ego seemed to be an elitist, possibly stemming from trying to get away from his own apparently humble beginnings.

Skinner is the broadest character, with the broadest motivations: he's mean and greedy. How did he become mean and greedy? How did he become Gustaeu's right hand man? Good questions, but the movie already runs 2 hours, and I think he worked just fine as the guy who's just mean and greedy. (Hopefully, we'll find some answers to those in the deleted scenes on the DVD, because I bet the Pixar folks did think about it . ) Also, I believe Skinner got the restaurant by default. I think they said that the will bequeathed the restaurant to his sous chef, i.e., to whoever held that position at the time of his death, not necessarily to Skinner specifically.

Also, I believe that Skinner is a send-up of Eisner, who initially managed to win over Roy E. Disney, and whose regime, I think, did the company some good when it first came into power. It's possible it was similar for Skinner.