Rodent’s Delight

Remy is a French rat who wants to be a French chef. He can read books and understand human speech, and is even able to communicate with people by nods and shrugs and smiles. Writer-director Brad Bird offers no magic spell or other supernatural explanation for Remy’s abilities, which are not matched by any other animal in the movie. Fine. Since this is an animated feature, we’ll go along with it.

Remy gets his chance to cook when he finds himself in the kitchen of a once-great, now inert, Paris restaurant. The rat runs around throwing ingredients into a huge pot of soup, and the soup proves to be a brilliant success.

This sequence, which can be viewed online for free, lasts nine minutes, and it’s absolutely amazing. Brad Bird has succeeded in designing and executing a scene from a perspective no one before him has ever even attempted, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that you sit through the nine minutes with your mouth hanging open in wonder.

After this triumphant debut, Ratatouille has to contrive a way to keep Remy cooking. And here’s where its story begins both to kick in and to fray at the seams. Remy makes a new human friend in Linguini the janitor, the lowest of the low in the kitchen. Linguini needs Remy to cook for him, otherwise he’ll lose his job. Suddenly and conveniently, Remy discovers he can control Linguini’s physical movements by pulling this way and that on Linguini’s hair.

“This is strangely involuntary,” Linguini says. Remy can hide under Linguini’s toque and move the man’s arms and legs as though Linguini were a puppet.

This crucial plot point is just . . . weird. Remember–no magic is involved and no explanation for this mystical talent is proffered. Meanwhile, every other element in Ratatouille strives for hyperrealism. The depiction of the restaurant kitchen is meticulously accurate, and the visual rendition of the City of Light is so precise you are lulled into thinking a rat and a man are having a private moment at night along the banks of the Seine right where Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron danced in An American in Paris.

Endowing a rat not only with the talent to cook but also with the ability to turn a human being into a marionette is one inexplicable endowment too far for this movie.

It doesn’t help that Linguini is such an unattractive character: ugly, whiny, stupid, and dull. Watching him being yanked about by the rat in his hat while he howls and complains about it isn’t in the least funny. It’s off-putting. Linguini is so useless that Remy even has to maneuver him into the right position to plant a kiss on the kitchen’s hard-as-nails sous chef.

The complications continue, and get mind-numbing. Linguini turns out to be the love child of the restaurant’s now-dead chef. Its current chef is more interested in putting the restaurant’s name on frozen fast food than he is in cooking. Remy’s rat family shows up and wants him to get them food from the kitchen. Even though Remy arranges it so that Linguini ends up inheriting the restaurant, Linguini pitches an unbelievable fit because Remy is stealing food from him.

None of this is interesting. What’s interesting is Remy and only Remy. At its best, Ratatouille is a portrait of the artist as a young rat–a bracing introduction for its younger viewers to the idea of pursuing and creating excellence. This was a primary theme of Bird’s previous Pixar movie, The Incredibles–with superheroes struggling to hide their exceptional talents in a world where they get sued more often than they get celebrated. (There’s more than a whiff of Ayn Rand in Brad Bird’s worldview.) But with Remy stuck in Linguini’s toque, the movie loses the indelible charm of the rat’s (and Bird’s) delightful inventiveness in the soup scene, when Remy has not only to think up good ingredients but also figure out how to dump a carton of crème fraiche into a stewpot when he doesn’t have the body mass to lift it by himself. Instead, it’s about Remy pulling Linguini’s hair.

There wasn’t a false moment in The Incredibles, a sensational piece of work. Ratatouille doesn’t get back to its proper subject until the last 15 minutes, when it frees Remy from Linguini’s toque and allows him to lead his fellow rats into culinary battle all the way to a rousing and moving finale. Pixar’s last film, Cars, also found itself in its concluding scenes. One thing you can say about Pixar: This is one company that knows how to end a picture.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.