Dave reviews ratatooie…. hang on, that’s not how it’s spelt…

By Dave
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Goddamn it, if you’re going to make a child’s film, at least give it a name that children will be able to spell. I mean, I get it, the story is about a rat that can cook, so it’s all very clever and whatever, but is the average 7-year-old going to be able to spell Ratatouille? I’m a 20-year-old spelling genius, and I keep having to look up where the ‘i’ fits in.

Silly name aside though, Ratatouille is a high quality film from the masters of the CGI cartoon, Pixar. In it, we follow the lives of the Master chef rat Remy and his hapless human counterpart Linguini as they turn round the fortunes of Linguini’s father’s restaurant to make it the best in Paris. It’s a fairly standard story, a pair of hapless outcasts do something against the odds and so on, but it’s all very well pulled off and is very slick.

A mention must be obviously given to the CGI itself- it’s incredible. Instead of trying for any kind of realism, Pixar have instead created a cartoon paradise version of Paris, where everybody sits in restaurants or cafés and owns apartments overlooking the Eiffel Tower. That’d not the say the graphics are primitive though, far from it in fact- everything is beautifully detailed and warm looking, and the liquid effects are nothing short of amazing.

The characters are also nice and fun- they’re happily cartoonish, bending and bouncing around and generally superseding the usual wooden mannequins so many CGI characters seem to end up looking like. They’re also easy to like- even the rats, normally associated with disease and litter, are totally loveable.

What puts this ahead of the average CGI film though, is that Ratatouille has soul. And I don’t mean that in the popular black origin music kind, but in the ’someone’s obviously put a lot of love and care into this’ kind. Whereas a lot of CGI animations are all flashy graphics but stereotypical and dull stories, Ratatouille is full of life. Sure, it has all the stunning effects and whatnot, but it also has fun characters and a type of love and care imbued into it that I’ve not felt since watching the hand drawn Disney cartoons of my youth. This is what makes it for me. Cartoons should be beautiful and heart-warming; not a bunch of graphics forced into a ‘family fun’ shaped hole. Ratatouille wasn’t just family fun, it was a work of art, a beautiful show of what a children’s film should be, a loved one giving you the best hug ever. It was brilliant.

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Tags: Disney, Ian Holm, Linguini, Pixar, Ratatouille, Rats, Remy