Originally posted at the DL January 2016
Y'know how when you know a lot about a subject stories about it usually become hard to watch because it turns out writers don't usually know shit about shit and get everything wrong?
Yeah Ratatouille isn't that movie.
That is actually pretty close to a what a brigade kitchen looks like and that is actually a lot of the little tips you're supposed to learn and cooks actually are, in fact, all insane.
It's the little timers going off in your head all the time.
It's actually a strange sort of family movie though, because if we're being blunt most of the movie is every character using the other characters. I mean yeah nobody goes out of their way to be an asshole but it's not something you see a lot: there's a lot of acknowledgement of everyone's own personal hangups and selfishness. Some of it is probably just the really out of whack power dynamics between any two main characters, where the lead is a literal rodent and each subsequent character is the direct subordinate of the next most prominent character.
Honestly though while I do like Remy as a character I don't feel like his stuff with his family later in the movie really adds anything. I guess you need a sort of breaking point so that both he and Linguine have wronged the other? But I guess that I felt like his arc reached a reasonable enough conclusion in the pretty early going and you really didn't need more than maybe one scene later on for him to kinda go "no, I was right, and I can't let rejection keep me down". It could also be just that I care more about the human cast.
In general though Ratatouille is known to have had some production issues, along the lines of "we had to replace the director and Brad Bird had to redo chunks of script when he jumped into the project", and you can see some of those seams. Linguine's and Remy's stories don't always feel like they go in the same movie, even though the two of them do make sense as a unit. It's not wholly jarring because they do try to make the culture clash part of the story, but you can still tell.
Still, it's cute, and actually more or less knows it's stuff which is nice.
Rating- 7/10
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