Ratatouille

June 29 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 26

You might have an idea for a movie. Maybe it’s an idea for a book, or a TV show, or some other creative endeavor. “It’s such a good idea” you think. “If only I could just get the thing made it’d be so successful and I’d be recognized for the genius I am”. If this is you, I have bad news for you.

There is no such thing as a “good idea”. There is only good execution.

I will grant you that there are ideas that are attention grabbing, and there are ideas that naturally lend themselves to the traditional three-act structure expected out of standard American cinema. The landscape is littered with bad-to-acceptable films with “good ideas”. “What if there was a movie that told the story of a romantic relationship from the perspective of both people involved and explored their inconsistencies? Like Rashomon (1950) but a rom-com” sounds like a fantastic idea. It resulted in the incredibly mid He Said, She Said (1991). Remaking a 60s sexy British spy TV show with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman in their prime of hottie-dom seems like a no brainer, but it resulted in the unwatchable slog that is The Avengers (1998). Making an action epic about the battle of Thermopylae sounds like it would whip ass but unfortunately 300 (2007) is just ass.

Just as a “good idea” isn’t guaranteed to result in a good movie, there are absolutely cinematic masterpieces that on their faces seem like bad ideas. “FBI Agent tries and fails to capture buddhist bank robbing surfer” is a profoundly stupid idea and it gave us the greatest action film of the 1990s. “Two SNL cast members who are at-best okay at singing and dancing make a musical out of their least funny bit on the show” sounds like a vanity project nightmare but it gave us a masterpiece. “Bad” ideas have been made into excellent movies, movies like Ratatouille.

This is the part where I recap the plot of the movie. Today, I would like you to imagine that you have never seen or heard of the film Ratatouille. Put yourself into the mind of a film producer being pitched this story and tell me if you’d greenlight it.

A rat living in the French countryside named Remy (Patton Oswalt) has an exceptional palette and dreams of being a fine dining chef. His father, Django (Brian Dennehey) disapproves of Remy’s flights of fancy. Remy idolizes the recently deceased Parisian chef Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett) whose eponymous restaurant was once the most celebrated in Paris until one day when he got an unfavorable review from the city’s most sharp-tongued critic Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole) which basically killed him. When an attempt to steal some saffron goes awry, Remy and his family are separated and Remy finds himself in Paris at Gusteau’s where he sees the new garbage boy Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano) making a dog’s breakfast of everything he comes in contact with. Despite the fact that one is a human being and the other is a rat, Remy and Alfredo become friends, and Remy discovers a system wherein he can pull Alfredo’s hair to involuntarily move his limbs and operate him like a marionette. Remy (though Alfredo) cooks spectacular dishes and ultimately puts Gusteau’s back on the culinary map, despite the meddling of the grouchy chef de cuisine Skinner (Ian Holm) who wishes to discredit Alfredo because he is secretly Gusteau’s son, and thus legally the heir to his restaurant. Ultimately Remy and Alfredo succeed at getting around Skinner’s machinations to cook a showstopping meal for Ego and live happily ever after.

I really could have stopped at “Ratatouille is a movie about a rat who aspires to be a fine dining chef”. While I understand the fish-out-of-water / unlikely origins tropes the concept is mining, it’s an incredibly tough sell when the story is about an animal that is de facto synonymous with “vermin infestation” and is being pitched as “something that belongs in a kitchen”. This goes beyond “dog who wants to play basketball”, because a dog on a basketball court is not a cultural shorthand for “something incredibly vile and disgusting”. Still, Pixar decided to go ahead with this film.

In an interview with Bloomberg Business last year, Pixar president Jim Morris made a statement about how its creative team would be focussing less on autobiographical tales and more on stories with clear mass appeal. My corner of the internet relentlessly clowned on this statement after the story came out, and they were right to do so. It’s a bad call to neuter one’s creative team like that, especially when two of the flops Pixar was trying to correct itself away from were stories about immigrant families (2022’s Turning Red and 2023’s Elemental) at a time when anti-immigrant political sentiment was on the rise, giving way to the political horrorshow we find ourselves in today. Here’s the deal though: it’s not like this is some outlandish novel position given Pixar’s track record. Pixar has given us four kids movies about talking toys, three about talking cars, and two each about cute monsters, talking fish, and superheroes. These are profoundly middle-of-the-road lowest-common-denominator film pitches, which only makes “rat who wants to be a fine dining chef” all the stranger as a move Pixar would make.

Pixar is in the business of making animated features designed to appeal to children, and the notion of a cartoon revolving around the main character’s career aspirations makes it all the more bonkers of a pitch. Children do not generally dream of labor, and if they do they generally dream of fantastically exciting labor, like being a ballet dancer or a firefighter. Remy dreams of being a chef, which is absolutely a thing that many people do dream about, but rarely the kind of young children who are the bread-and-butter of animated film promotion. Further, Ratatouille famously employed French Laundry and Per Se owner Thomas Keller as a consultant, who pulled no punches in helping the creative team demonstrate some of the less glamorous aspects of running a fine dining kitchen. Nothing says “fun kids movie” like a high stress job with the omnipresent threat of physical injury and a highly regimented structure where people yell at you constantly and all your coworkers are very likely criminals. Admittedly, Ratatouille successfully romanticizes some of these aspects — working with someone who needed to flee their country because they ran guns for the resistance is way cooler than working with someone who used to make meth in his bathtub — but that only speaks to the skill of its execution.

Healthy work environment

Here’s the thing: the fact that Ratatouille gets food and fine dining right isn’t just a fun easter egg, it’s absolutely an integral part of what makes this movie work. Patron saint of dirtbag line cooks Anthony Bourdain had this to say about the film in an Entertainment Weekly interview:

It’s a measure of how deficient Hollywood has been in making an accurate restaurant-food based film that far and away the best was about an animated rat. They got the food, the reactions to food, and tiny details to food really right — down to the barely noticeable pink burns on one of the character’s forearms. I really thought it captured a passionate love of food in a way that very few other films have.

For the 15.7 million people in America who work in restaurants, the cartoon rat movie spoke directly to their souls because it got the details right. For everyone who doesn’t, the fact that it spoke to a very real set of passions and drives in a real and relatable way makes them care about food and restaurants and fine dining for those two hours in a way that they might not have before. I’ve never worked in a fine dining kitchen before, but I know what it means to be told by the boss that you need to devote your talents to making something that’s beneath you. I know what it is to be overlooked because you don’t have the right pedigree. I know what it is to have someone you love not be able to understand the passion that drives you. I suspect that you, dear reader, do as well. You don’t need to have first hand knowledge of the brigade system of organizing a fine dining kitchen to understand that it’s both a necessary means of getting things done efficiently but also something that grinds down individuality, but I suspect that there’s something about your job, your school, your social life, or your family life that’s like that that you have mixed feelings about. You don’t need to have worked such a job to feel its reality, but its reality is what makes you feel those feelings.

On a certain level, Ratatouille was there to meet a moment. Food-based entertainment was hitting its stride in the mid-2000s, with Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares premiering in 2004, Iron Chef America in 2005, and Top Chef in 2006. The world was ready for a big budget highly promoted food and restaurant movie. On another level though, it did not simply meet this wave but contributed to it. I would not be shocked if a generation of food professionals are currently out in the world plating asparagus curls with forceps because they saw Ratatouille at an impressionable age¹. Food entertainment continues to be huge, and I’m only slightly joking when I say that I’m reasonably sure that this film is responsible for the rat boy phenomenon. I’m not saying that a generation of people were attracted to Remy the rat, but I suspect that Alfredo Linguini with his big nose and lanky frame and line cook job was responsible for a good deal of sexual awakenings that have given us Timothée Chalamet and Barry Keoghan and Jeremy Allen White² as sex symbols today.

Look me in the eye and tell me this isn’t a still from A Complete Unknown (2024)

Ratatouille was so well executed that it was the realization of something often spoken of but honestly quite rare: the motion picture that’s enjoyable for the whole family. The stakes are laid out so clearly and brought together so well that a child can follow along and enjoy the ride of the rat who pilots a man like a puppet as he makes sweetbreads, but the story is not dumbed down in any way for the kiddos. It is a movie that deals with the hyper reality of living in a shitty apartment while you try and make ends meet at your restaurant job. It is also a movie that deals in the magic and romance of falling in love in mid 20th century France that people glean from looking at posters for Jean-Luc Godard movies³. The jokes make you laugh, the emotional beats make you feel feelings, and the story is incredibly tight, and all this in a movie whose premise is “what if there was a rat who piloted a man so that he could make the world’s greatest summer vegetable casserole”. I guarantee your idea for a piece of art is no worse than that. Go make it, but make sure you make it well.

Rating: ★★★★★. I will sign off on this review with the only good use of AI I have yet to see:

Economics: Like every pre-pandemic Pixar movie, Ratatouille was a runaway success story. It opened 18 years ago on my 25th birthday (as you read this it’s my 43rd⁴) at number one at the box office, beating out Live Free Or Die Hard also in its first week of release. It would ultimately make $206 million domestically as well as $420 million internationally with $217 million in home video sales on top of it against its $150 million budget. Pixar movies cost a lot of money to make, but boy howdy when they hit do they hit.

1. If that’s you, let me know! Leave a comment down below

2. I know Jeremy Allen White is actually buff as hell, but none of us knew that when we were crushing on him when the first season of The Bear came out

3. Posters for Godard movies are romantic as hell. he actual Goddard movies are… less romantic

4. A lovely birthday present would be sharing this essay with a friend. If you’re that friend, a lovely birthday present would be subscribing to this newsletter.