Is Ratatouille Pixar's Weirdest Film?

Ratatouille. Image courtesy of Pixar.

When you think about it , 2007’s Ratatouille is super weird. An animated film about a gangly doofus who ends up being controlled by a genius French rat chef is the kind of thing you might come up with after suffering brain damage in a lumberyard accident. And yet, not only does it somehow works, it works miraculously well. Ratatouille made over $620 million, and was near universally praised by critics and audiences. Everyone loved this film about sentient rats committing health code violations for the love of food.

There are several reasons why Ratatouille worked, in spite of or maybe because of, its conceptual weirdness. The most obvious is that Brad Bird was at the helm. As he showed with The Incredibles just a few years earlier as well as during most of his career up that point, the man has a gift for stories, characters and visuals - all the essential ingredients of a great animated film. You know right away the film is playing in the inventive mental playground of Brad Bird when it shows Remy, our erstwhile Rat protagonist, in the early going talking about his love of food in an overwhelmingly visual, tactile way. That sequence is pure visual cinema, and it’s great.

But there is also a kind of depth to the material - a reverence for the food, the mise en scene of Paris, the way food and place can evoke deep feelings in us - that just shines through. This isn’t some shallow film about French cuisine; it’s more like a love letter, one that is beautifully illustrated. Again, this being Pixar, the film uses the medium of animation to take us places we couldn’t otherwise go, in this case into the inner life of a rat who is also a very talented chef.

And that right there, the boldness and the sheer weirdness of the idea, shows that Pixar had regained its sense of direction after all the corporate drama had played out in the real world during the production and release of Cars. With Ratatouille you not only have a supremely talented auteur at the helm, but the film benefits from a clarity of vision and cohesion, the kind of confidence where a studio and a creative team can all get together and decide, yeah we are going to make this weird ass film about rats who cook in Paris. It was weird, and it was bold. And it worked.