Rat * a * too * ee

The joy of a rat-infested kitchen -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I'm 49 going on 9, so it's no wonder that I have a lifelong love of cartoons and animated features. I used to think of the Golden Era as the 1950's, dominated by the hilarious likes of Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. Prior to that, we had the wacked-out Loony Tune cartoons in the 1940's and by the 1960's we had the pathetic stick-figure quality of Hanna-Barbera with their repetitious backgrounds and ultra-lame laugh tracks. Maybe they were thinking that kids wouldn't notice, but au contraire -- kid's especially notice the lack of quality or realism. It boggles my mind now that Scooby-Doo is so popular as a retro series; I consider it the lowest point of animation quality.

One could describe the 60's, 70's and 80's as an animation Dark Ages -- a period dominated by cheesy low-quality fare that mostly defies one to remember a single title or series. Disney brought us out of the Dark Ages starting in 1989 with The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. The art of detail, nuance and realism was not a lost art after all. It needed to be coaxed out of its shell by a studio that cultivates quality. Television has given us many other shows in the 90's and 00's (see Fox, Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network) -- we have The Simpsons, Japanese anime and many other revivals of cartoon quality.

The gifted people of Pixar have just released Ratatouille, about a Parisian rat, Remy, that has the gift of cooking. Remy has dreams of being a famous chef which are stymied by the fact he's a mere disgusting rodent. He must express his culinary gift by telling a young man, Linguini, what ingredients to use. You'll have to see the movie for the precise mechanism of it all; it's charming and cute albeit defying all credibility. Patton Oswalt voices Remy and is his usual understated, cynical funny self. Pixar manages to make Remy and his rat friends cute and adorable in ways you never imagined a rat could be. Those of you who read Entertainment Weekly may have run across Owen Gleiberman's panning (no pun intended) of the movie. Gleiberman is something of a snobby, humorless frump. That he gave Ratatouille a "B" is amazing; Gleiberman is to movie critics what Anton Ego is to food critics in our rat chef movie. He's a curmudgeon who's hard to please. Nobody should get too bent by what he has to say.

A couple of fun observations -- am wondering what the French will think of how they're depicted in this movie. The head chef is a diabolical, egomaniacal French meanie, and his female assistant chef (ironically Linguini's romantic interest) is a shrill, testy prima donna with a short fuse. The American animators also had fun at the USA's expense by poking fun at a line of low-brow microwavable BBQ products that the meanie chef is developing for an American market. Turnabout is fair play after all when poking fun at national identities.

When the movie ends, stay and watch the credits roll. There is a great animation and song that follows the movie and it's well worth watching all by itself. Director Brad Bird et al deserve a pat on the back for making rats so dam cute, and giving us a culinary tour de force for the dog days of July.

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