Ratatouille

I love just about everything Pixar puts out. What's so refreshing about their approach is the male-centric perspective the movies bring, be it a single father searching for his son (Finding Nemo), a single male learning the responsibility of raising a child (Monsters, Inc.), or male bonding between friends (Toy Story). And then there's Ratatouille.

Our rat hero, Remy (Patton Oswalt), is a rat who wants to be a chef. Our human hero, Linguini (Lou Romano), is a garbage boy for the fine French restaurant Gusteau's with a mysterious past who just wants to get the girl (Colette, voiced by Jeanine Garofalo). These two eventually cross paths and struggle with the boundaries that separate man from rodent, the untalented from the prodigy. Remy strikes out on his own and gets a job (of sorts), distancing himself from his family and friends. Linguini struggles to impress Colette in the kitchen under the devious watch of Skinner (Ian Holm). Throughout we hear the mantra: "Anyone can cook!" as espoused by the ghostly "figment of Remy's imagination," August Gusteau (Brad Garrett).

Unlike the other Pixar movies that are tightly focused on a single core message and convey it beautifully, Ratatouille is all over the place. Will Remy convince his family that striking out on his own was a good idea? Will he make it as a rat turned chef? Can he keep up his façade as a puppet master of Linguini's cooking talent? Speaking of Linguini, what is his mysterious background all about? Will Linguini convince Colette of his love? Will Skinner figure out Linguini has no talent for cooking? And what IS Linguini's talent anyway? Will Skinner get away with his plans to sully the reputation of Gusteau's restaurant through blatant commercialization?

But that's not what Ratatouille is all about. It's actually about the crypt-like critic known as Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O'Toole with creaky menace). He is a bitter, unlikable skeleton of a man, thin where Gusteau was fat. Ego doesn't like food; he claims that he loves it, and if he doesn't love it, "I don't SWALLOW." Somewhere in the course of Ego's career as a food critic, he lost track of what makes life enjoyable. It's up to our dynamic duo to convince him otherwise.

So the message isn't actually about whether or not anyone can cook. It's about remembering what matters about food: not the taste so much as the feelings and memories associated with it. Unfortunately, that message is muddled by all the other questions laid out in the film.

As a result of all the other plotlines, some of the characters become one-dimensional. The rats are more fleshed out than the humans. In fact, Linguini seems like such a doofus with no actual skill that it's hard to care about his plight or what Colette sees in him. It's implied that his true calling is as a roller-skating waiter, but that talent appears in the last few minutes of the film.

Ratatouille wraps up with Ego's epiphany, another human who isn't fleshed out nearly as much as his counterparts. The fairytale ending is a bit hard to swallow, but that probably depends on your opinion of rats in a kitchen. Overall, Ratatouille has a lot of heart but not a lot of art, and the film's lack of focus prevents it from becoming a true Pixar classic.