Ratatouille

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Ratatouille
"Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." - Anton Ego
Genre: Comedy Drama Directed by: Brad Bird Produced by: Brad Lewis Written by: Brad Bird Jan Pinkava Starring: Patton Oswalt Ian Holm Lou Romano Janeane Garofalo Peter O'Toole Brad Garrett Brian Dennehy Peter Sohn Cinematography: Sharon Calahan Robert Anderson Distributed by: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution Release date: June 22, 2007 (Kodak Theatre) June 29, 2007 (United States) Runtime: 111 minutes Country: United States Budget: $150 million Box office: $623.7 million

Ratatouille (pronounced Rat-a-too-ee), is a 2007 American computer-animated comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures and released by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. It is the eighth film produced by Pixar and was co-written and directed by Brad Bird, who took over from Jan Pinkava in 2005. The title refers to a French dish, "ratatouille", which is served at the end of the film and is also a play on words about the species of the main character. The film stars the voices of Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano, Ian Holm, Janeane Garfalo. Peter O'Toole, Brain Dennehy, Peter Sohn, and Brad Garrett. It premiered on June 22, 2007, at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California, with its general release June 29, 2007, in the United States.

Plot

Remy dreams of becoming a great chef, despite being a rat in a definitely rodent-phobic profession. He moves to Paris to follow his dream, and with the help of hapless garbage boy Linguini he puts his culinary skills to the test in the kitchen, but he has to stay in hiding at the same time, with hilarious consequences. Remy eventually gets the chance to prove his culinary abilities to a great food critic but is the food good? A Pixar animation.

Why It's Delicious To Watch And Taste

1. It is considered to be one of the greatest films in Pixar's entire library of films, alongside The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Cars, Monsters, Inc."' and, the movie that came out a year later, WALL-E, which was all released around the same time.
2. The concept of the movie is distinctively creative and has a unique twist; having a rat, something that is not supposed to be in the kitchen house, want to work in said kitchen restaurant, instead of generic films simply about cooking food by chef, making it Brad Bird and Pixar film.
3. Director Brad Bird and some of the film's crew members visited Paris for major inspiration, to create the food animation used in the film, the crew consulted chefs from both France and the United States.
4. The characters are all very likable and enjoyable in their own ways, such as Remy, Alfredo Linguini and Colette Tatou.
5. Some visually pleasing scenes, such as the sequence of the camera following Remy as he explores Paris and the numerous times cooking is shown.
6. A very great voice cast, Patton Oswalt (Remy), Lou Romano (Linguini), Janeane Grafolo (Colette), Ian Holm (Skinner), and the late Peter O'Toole (Ego) are prime examples. It also greatly helps that the voice acting itself is also absolutely phenomenal.
7. The comical villains, Chef Skinner and Anton Ego are both great antagonists, and the latter gets some good character development.
8. Beautiful animation, especially for 2007 and Pixar standards. A prime example is how the food looks absolutely delicious even after more than 10 years since it is released.
   • The character designs are very stylized, having a unique blend of Brad Bird and Pixar's styles.
9. A great sense of humor.
10. The scene where Ego tries Remy's ratatouille for the first time in years by showing the flashback is not only one of the film's strongest scenes, but one of the best scenes in Pixar history.
11. The film is not afraid to show death in a kid's movie, a major example is when Remy is shown by his father, Django, what happens to rats in Paris, even showing us the dead bodies of these mice.
    • It is also not afraid to show blood for target audiences' movie, like the flashback scene where young Anton Ego got leg bleeding after the bike accident.
12. The film became so popular that in 2020, users of the social media TikTok tried and somewhat succeeded in adapting the movie into a Broadway musical.
13. Linguini being Gusteau's illegitimate son and rightful owner of the restaurant is a surprising plot twist. However, it turns out that he is not a great chef, but rather Ratatouille, who helps him cook foods to impress critics instead.
    • Linguini becomes a waiter on roller skates while the rats cook food.
14. Funny, but Romantic Ship: Remy forcing Linguini to kiss Colette may be funny, but it was a perfect chemistry to them. Colette is a serious cook, while Linguini is a clumsy one.
15. The movie gives fantastic lessons about being an artist and a critic, and for people with dreams overall.
    • How it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from, anyone can do anything that they desire if they truly set their minds to it and put everything they have into succeeding said ambition; because what we can and can't do is determined by ourselves, and only by ourselves. This is demonstrated throughout the film by Remy's passion for cooking and desire to be a chef in spite of being a rat, who is hated and hunted by chefs due to their tendencies to steal food. But Remy proves his aspiration after he helps Linguini cook amazing meals for the restaurant. And while the other cooks don't accept Linguini's and Remy's partnership at first, they eventually do so after they realize how artistic Remy is when it comes to cooking.
    • Ego's character also offers a good commentary on how toxic and damaging criticism can be; how sometimes our seek for "great and true art" can hold us back from simply enjoying the things we love.
16. Michael Giacchino whips up another jazzy and insufferably catchy musical score for a Brad Bird and Pixar film. The scene of Remy imagines delicious combinations being represented by two different kinds of music fusing is one of the best visualizations in the whole film, and of food in general. And the cue for Colette's Training Montage re-arranged as a bombastic salsa number for the credits just takes the cake.
    • There's also a number of spontaneous slap-bass guitar riffs hidden throughout (courtesy of legendary session bassist Abraham Laboriel Sr.) which are just the cherry on top.
    • "Le Festin" that plays in the opening logo. If you look at the translated lyrics, you'll see that the song is basically a theme for Remy and the film; the tale of a thief who hates stealing while feeling that there wasn't a choice in the matter. Later on, the thief achieves and a new start in life through his passion and determination to break free.

Bad Qualities

1. The story can be a bit predictable as it builds up to the "Liar Revealed" cliché.
2. It is never explained how Remy can control Linguini's body by pulling on his hair.
   • Likewise, it is also never really explained how Gusteau died when his restaurant lost one of his five stars other then Ego's review for not liking his good food despite him and his restaurant being very popular in Paris (seriously are we supposed to assume that the one food critic speaks for all thousands if not millions of people that eat at his restaurant every year?).

Trivia

• With a runtime at 111 minutes, Ratatouille is the 4th longest Pixar animated film after Incredibles 2 at 118 minutes, Cars at 117 minutes and The Incredibles at 115 minutes.
• The video game adaptation marked the most comprehensive cross-launch in THQ's history.
• The trailer for Ratatouille debuted with the release of Cars on June 9, 2006 and its video game adaptation three days earlier, its immediate predecessor filmography of Pixar. It depicts an original scene where Remy is caught red-handed on the cheese trolley in the restaurant's dining area, sampling the cheese and barely escaping the establishment, intercut with separate scenes of the rat explaining directly to the audience why he is taking such risks. Similar to most of Pixar's teaser trailers, the scene was not present in the final film release.
• This was the first Pixar non-independent film.
• Disney/Pixar was concerned that audiences, particularly children, would not be familiar with the word "ratatouille" and its pronunciation. The title was, therefore, also spelled phonetically within trailers and on posters. For similar reasons, in the American release of the film, on-screen text in French was printed in English, such as the title of Gusteau's cookbook and the sign telling kitchen staff to wash their hands, though, in the British English release, these are rendered in French. In Canada, the film was released theatrically with text in English, but on DVD, the majority of the text (including Gusteau's will) was in French.
• This was the last Pixar film to use the 1995-2007 customized Walt Disney Pictures logo (minus the teaser trailer of WALL•E). From the next film WALL•E onwards (barring Incredibles 2, which uses a customized opening variant), all Pixar films use the current Disney logo (a realistic-looking Cinderella Castle from Walt Disney World in front of a night sky), similar to the other more recent Disney films. Originally, it was a white-stylized castle covered with thin blue horizontal stripes under a curved line in front of a blue background. The 2006 Disney logo was used in some TV spots for the movie, however.
• This is the last Pixar film to have the text "Distributed By: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution" in the credits.
• From Ratatouille onwards, all Pixar films have Arabic numerals in the closing credits: Copyright © 2007 Disney Enterprises, Inc./Pixar All Rights Reserved. Until Cars (2006), all Pixar movies had Roman numerals (e.g., © MMVI) in the closing credits.
• This is the first Pixar film not to be released on VHS, and was only released on DVD instead.
• The gunshot in the opening was deliberately inserted to hook the audience in to wonder what was involved with it, and to be interested in what was going to happen in the overall movie
• This is the first Pixar film since the first Toy Story to only have a widescreen release for its US home release.
• When the Ratatouille teaser trailer first premiered, many fans thought that it was David Schwimmer voicing Emile due to Peter Sohn having a similar voice. Emile's name was also rumored for the longest time to be Rollie. David Schwimmer would later voice a Thark in John Carter, which was directed by executive producer Andrew Stanton.
• The movie spawned an infamous ripoff of it made by Vídeo Brinquedo, called Ratatoing.

Reception

Ratatouille received widespread universal acclaim by critics and audiences for Giacchino's score, voice acting, writing, and the animation. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 96% approval rating with an average rating of 8.47/10 based on 249 reviews. The site's consensus reads: "Fast-paced and stunningly animated, Ratatouille adds another delightfully entertaining entry—and a rather unlikely hero—to the Pixar canon.". Metacritic, another review aggregator website which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated a score of 96 out of 100 based on 37 reviews, the highest of any Pixar film and the twenty-first highest film rating on the site. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "A" on scale of A to F.

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