Ratatouille
2007 · Brad Bird
Remy, a rat, possesses a palate far more refined than that of his fellow comrades. He dreams of becoming a chef, one who creates rather than scavenges. When fate deposits him in the sewers beneath one of Paris’s most famous restaurants, he finds himself ideally placed to fulfill his dream. Forming an unusual alliance with a hapless young kitchen worker, Remy begins a daring culinary double life. As Remy pursues his vision, he must navigate the suspicions of the calculating Head Chef Skinner, the disapproval of Remy’s own colony, and the foreboding presence of renowned food critic Anton Ego, who strikes fear in the hearts of chefs all throughout France.
dir. Brad Bird · 2007
Brad Bird inherited a troubled production mid-stream, rewrote it in eighteen months, and delivered what many consider Pixar's most elegant film: a rat with a refined palate scheming his way through the kitchen of a fading Parisian restaurant. Coming off The Incredibles, Bird again smuggled an auteurist argument into family entertainment — the dead chef's motto 'anyone can cook' is really a claim about where genius comes from, and the climactic review by the vulture-like critic Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O'Toole) is the finest thing ever written about criticism in a Hollywood film. The craft was a leap even by Pixar standards: food rendered so tactilely that the studio brought in chefs as consultants, a Paris of burnished evening light, and kitchen choreography timed like silent comedy. Michael Giacchino's accordion-flecked score won hearts; the film won the animation Oscar. Bird's insistence that a kids' cartoon could hinge on questions of taste, vocation, and artistic gatekeeping made it the Pixar film that cinephiles claim most fiercely as their own.
Lines of influence
- The Incredibles (2004) — Bird's prior Pixar feature establishes his signature staging of action through densely purposeful blocking, importing live-action camera pacing and wide-lens comic geography into CG animation.
- The Iron Giant (1999) — Bird's directorial method of grounding a fantastical non-verbal protagonist through restrained, appeal-driven character animation and earned sentiment rather than gag-per-second mugging.
- City Lights (1931) — The pantomime-pathos tradition Bird explicitly drew on: Remy, mute to humans, must carry emotion and comic timing entirely through silent-comedy body-acting like the Little Tramp.
- Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) — Keaton's architectural physical comedy — a small body navigating and being menaced by hostile mechanical environments — is the blueprint for the kitchen-as-deathtrap choreography.
- Lady and the Tramp (1955) — Disney's precedent for animating eating as a sensual, romantic set-piece; the shared-spaghetti scene prefigures Remy's synesthetic flavor-bursts of color and sound.
- Cinderella (1950) — The Disney conceit of anthropomorphic rodents operating covertly inside a human household, extended into Remy literally puppeteering Linguini by the hair.
- Babette's Feast (1987) — The transcendent-meal structure in which cooking becomes redemptive art and a single dish converts a hardened skeptic — the direct dramatic template for Anton Ego's ratatouille epiphany.
- Tampopo (1985) — Defines the food film as genre through reverent, tactile close-ups of ingredients and technique that treat culinary craft with the seriousness of martial discipline.
- The Red Shoes (1948) — The archetype of vocation-as-tyranny and the exacting maestro (Gusteau, Skinner) demanding total artistic surrender — 'anyone can cook' as the film's rebuttal to that gospel.
- Amélie (2001) — Giacchino's accordion-and-musette Parisian score shares the whimsical French sound palette Yann Tiersen popularized, scoring a storybook, over-saturated Paris.
- Big Night (1996) — The kitchen-workplace drama built on the friction between commercial survival and uncompromised craft, staged through real cooking labor rather than montage shorthand.
- Vertigo (1958) — Cinematographer Sharon Calahan's burnished, source-motivated evening light and the dolly-zoom vertigo shot on Ego's balcony are lifted as deliberate live-action-cinema quotations.
- WALL·E (2008) — Pixar's immediate extension of Ratatouille's silent-comedy gamble — a near-mute protagonist carrying a first act almost entirely through Chaplinesque pantomime and gesture.
- Coco (2017) — Extends the Pixar auteur-in-a-family-film thesis of artistic calling versus inherited expectation, again resolving vocation through a talent the protagonist's world forbids.
- Soul (2020) — Directly inherits the 'genius, spark, and vocation' theme — interrogating the myth of innate talent and the cost of an all-consuming artistic drive.
- The Menu (2022) — Weaponizes the same chef-versus-critic power dynamic and artistic-gatekeeping theme, inverting Ego's arc into a chef's lethal revenge on the consumers of fine dining.
- Chef (2014) — Carries forward the critic-review-as-inciting-wound and loving food-porn cinematography, staging authentic real-time cooking as the emotional core.