Ratatouille (dir. Brad Bird, 2007) - Review

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Ratatouille was a popular and critical success upon its 2007 release, stealing the hearts of all generations with its gorgeous, touchingly wacky homage to the democratising power of food. The Oscar-snatching tale of aspiring rodent chef Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) established Disney-Pixar as a global cultural machine which brought CGI into the lives of a generation, part of a broader transition to a 21st-century silicon-powered culture of making the impossible real. Ratatouille imported a modernity of not only technology but ideas, communicated through a worldview that developed the illusory naturalism of classic Disney into something deeper.

The medium of animation has radical origins: much of its early content drew inspiration from avant-garde modernism, with its reduction of realistic images to two dimensions which could flaunt the laws of physics. Classic Disney films rejected these tendencies in favour of idealised escapism, via picturesque medieval fairy tales whose stylistic simplicity disguised the technology that produced them. Ratatouille is rooted in the anxieties of modern life - commercialisation, globalisation, drastic social change - and alchemises them into a joyous fable, its serious message enhanced by its levity.

The most explicit political radicalism of Ratatouille manifests in the cookbook written by Chef Gusteau, ‘Anyone Can Cook’, which inspires sentient rat Remy (Patton Oswalt) to learn to read, cook, and eventually team up with inept plongeur Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano) to run a gourmet restaurant. The egalitarian quality of experience is central to Gusteau’s ideology, underpinned not only by a sense of fairness and democracy but by a moral code. The deceased chef lays out a manifesto which any politician or life coach might envy, first on the TV (“you must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from… the only limit is your soul”) and later as the apparition which Remy imagines as his guide, proscribing theft and cowardice. The ideals stated by an idealised fiction of Gusteau (“I am just a figment of your imagination!”) create the infinite possibilities of Remy’s adventure and the social upheaval it brings, not least in his displacing the undeserving Linguini from the conventional inheritance plot which would grant the latter not only credit for reviving Gusteau’s restaurant, but ownership of it. This narrative of change and social progress is inextricable from the new medium of CGI animation.

The message is inherent in not only the visual medium but the production: Pixar’s democratic, handcrafted attitude to the creative process is apparent in the way that Shakespearean titans rub shoulders with animation artists in the voice cast (and future very-famous-TV-actor Will Arnett). The hapless Linguini - thrust into the spotlight in a job for which he is totally underqualified - was voiced by Lou Romano, a Pixar illustrator without prior (or subsequent) acting experience who provided a stand-in track and found himself starring opposite Peter O’Toole.

Although the film leans on stereotypes, it does so with winning transparency. Original writer Jan Pinkava intended to create an “informed representation from a position of interest and affection”, inspired by the idealised England of 101 Dalmatians, rather than a realistic article (Ringer, 2017); not a single character in the film’s sketch of gay Paree is voiced by a French actor, and many accents bear easier comparison to the Pink Panther than Truffaut. Yet such light, unpretentious characterisation allows the film to portray not only the elite and cloistered world of haute cuisine but broader social anxieties in a playful and deceptively thought-provoking manner. Snarling, Napoleonic antagonist Skinner (Ian Holm) requires a stepladder to berate his staff at eye level, in a faux-Gallic caricature like Inspector Dreyfus with his eye-twitching rages and his “pervert”-like attempts at disguise; yet his plot to monetise Gusteau’s culinary legacy with frozen dinners, from burritos to Chinese, reflects a globalised, consumerist reality.

Ethnically ambiguous feminist chef Colette (Janeane Garofalo) reacts to Linguini’s incompetent, nepotistic intrusion with displeasure, and her argument that “haute cuisine is an antiquated hierarchy built upon rules written by stupid old men… designed to make it impossible or women to enter this world” wouldn’t sound out of place in a contemporary New York Times op-ed. Despite proclaiming that “I’ve worked too hard… to jeopardise (her career) for some garbage boy who got lucky”, knife-brandishing Colette does exactly that, swiftly softened and endeared to viewer and Linguini as a love interest.

Meanwhile, Peter O’Toole’s witheringly sadistic critic Anton Ego plays on the trope of the British villain to comment on the destructive effects of the elitist class system on both society and the individual. Beyond the extremes of his characterisation - the body modelled on a vulture, the coffin-shaped room in which he disdainfully condemns restaurants to “the tourist trade” - Ego, like other stereotypes in the film, is revealed as an ordinary, real human being. The film reminds the viewers of the limits of narrative and convention when Remy’s ratatouille - “a peasant dish!”, as Skinner scoffs - unlocks a brief, tantalising glimpse of Ego’s childhood self.

Ego’s epiphany at the film’s climax is one of the many inversions that characterise Ratatouille: peasant fare becomes haute cuisine, rats become restauranteurs, and a hard, socially suppressed critic becomes a childlike, individually liberated admirer. As Ego suggests when outlining his demands for his meal, the film is about perspective - “fresh, clear, well-seasoned perspective” - delivered as literally shifting points of view in Remy-eye shots scuttling along the kitchen floor, or trapped in the toque as Linguini claims credit for his work. Ratatouille, both film and food, expresses the view that the elite and the subaltern have more in common, in terms of hopes, dreams, and feelings, than they might think; it speaks to the complex interplay of cultural stereotypes to the universal human experience, and the changing implications of the rituals of food on wider society.

Áine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.