Back in 2005, film critics on a night or two out in Paris might have wondered why the big names at Pixar, the American computer animation studio, were whizzing around the city on motorcycles, parking them brazenly in front of some of the French capital’s most famous restaurants, eating inside with their own design team, and picking up the colossal tab.
The delighted chefs and proprietors would have been quietly horrified had they known that director Brad Bird and producer Brad Lewis were not just planning to recreate the romance of Paris but also sizing up their restaurants as the prototype for the next Disney animated feature, Ratatouille, a film with an outlandish concept: the story of a talking rat who wanted to work as a chef in a kitchen, where normally he would have been public enemy number one.
Rémy the rat, inspired by a cookbook called Anyone Can Cook from the great (though entirely fictional) and late French chef, August Gusteau, wants to be a gourmet chef but is forced by the rest of the rat colony to spend his time detecting rat poison in their food. When the owner drives them out of their cosy existence in a French country house, Rémy floats in a storm drain to Paris, using Gusteau’s cookbook as a raft.
He hides out in Gusteau’s old restaurant, striking up a bizarre partnership with the bungling garbage boy, Linguini, who grabs his chance to become a chef and conjures up a series of brilliant meals with Rémy providing the culinary skills behind the scenes. Whenever Rémy has doubts he receives visitations, reminiscent of those to Hamlet from his late father, from Gusteau’s ghost, exhorting him to still greater efforts. It turns out that Gusteau committed suicide because his restaurant was downgraded from five to four stars by the tired and cynical food critic, Anton Ego, voiced by Peter O’Toole. Gusteau gets his revenge when Ego is induced to name the rat-infested restaurant as the one with the best chef in Paris.
The story’s brilliant characterisation, and endless twists and turns, has made this new rodent movie a huge hit with the French. It earned almost 15M Euros in its first week on release, the highest gross takings for the debut of an animated feature in France.
October 2007
