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Ratatouille

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Cert: U

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Dir: Brad Bird. Cast: Patton Oswalt, Brian Dennehy, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo

 

Description: A Paris street rat dreams of becoming a top chef in the beguiling new computer animated feature from Pixar (Toy Story, The Incredibles).

Country: US. 2007. 111mins

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There's a rat in my soup

 

Big cheese: Rémy, the gourmet rat, pitches up at the run-down Parisian restaurant once owned by his TV chef idol and puts his remarkable cooking skills to work to help restore the establishment to its former glory

Passion: The rat loves his cooking

I know best: Rémy shows off his culinary brain

Befriended: Linguini, a 'lowly plongeur'

Look here too

• Gallery: Ratatouille stills
• Animated conversation

Perhaps it's the bittersweet memory of being led out crying by my mother from Walt Disney's handcrafted Dumbo that spoilt computer generated animation for me. Though the best of the genre are of a technical standard even old Walt would marvel at, the emotion that made me blubber so thoroughly isn't often there.

It's not quite there in Pixar's latest either, but Ratatouille is so brilliantly imagined that you wonder how a computer can possibly have achieved it.

The computer here, though, is in the hands of Brad Bird (he made The Incredibles), which explains why, in a story about rats and cooking, there are characters you will remember and detail to die for.

There are a few dull patches and it goes on a little too long, but the film looks a treat from start to finish, setting a new benchmark in this respect. I wasn't led out in tears, but at least I stumbled into the light full of admiration.

Our vermin hero is Rémy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) who lives with his fellows in the countryside and, because he knows about food, is used as a taster by his father (Brian Dennehy).

There's poison about and only his refined tastebuds and nose can detect it. "Eat your garbage!" orders his dad once it's declared safe, but Rémy is too much of an artist to call it anything but food, thrown away by the humans he admires for their discovery of the delights of taste.

Unfortunately, humans don't admire him and his friends - hence the poison.

When the rats are cast out from their cottage home by an old lady with a gun, they are flung into the sewer and arrive wet and half drowned in Paris after a perilous journey that lands Rémy near to a haven of gourmet French food.

Having previously spied the telly programmes of Auguste Gusteau, a famous but now deceased chef whose theory was that anyone could cook, he finds himself next door to Gusteau's now failing restaurant. Dangerous as it is, he can't keep away.

There, Linguini (Lou Romano), Gusteau's nephew, has been reluctantly installed as a lowly plongeur by the diminutive head chef (Ian Holm). The young kitchen hand upsets the soup while cleaning up and in a desperate effort to hide his mistake accidentally shoves bits and pieces into the cauldron that ought to make it taste dreadful.

But Rémy, caught, bottled and then befriended by Linguini, saves him. Hiding under his hat and pulling the boy's hair like puppet strings as he instructs him, Rémy makes him into a super chef whom even Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole), the supercilious food correspondent who has already blasted the restaurant, finds to be a genius.

That's about half the story, which also includes a romance between Linguini and Colette, a pretty underchef (Janeane Garofalo). But it's not so much the tale that makes the film as the frequent marvel of its telling.

There are chase scenes worthy of Warner Brothers' master animator, Chuck Jones, as the humans try to get rid of the rat in the midst of their impeccable kitchen, and a brilliant sequence which has Rémy calling a horde of his friends in to make an impromptu meal for the snobbish connoisseurs who are the restaurant's customers.

The background detail - often so sketchily drawn by a computer's mouse in other recent animated films - is as remarkable as the character drawing. The old woman's cottage, Gusteau's kitchen and Paris itself are brought fully alive with sometimes tiny strokes of light and shade.

As for the characters, O'Toole's vulpine Ego is a particular joy (even if he seems to represent critics in general with a total lack of the respect such honourable members of the newspaper community surely deserve).

Everybody, rats and all, are given movements and expressions that only a highly observant animator can rustle up so successfully. The visualisation, which seems to have no limitation, is the real pleasure of Ratatouille.

There are no songs to distract from the storyline and only one brief syncopated moment when Rémy and his friends relax after their gastronomic triumph - but it doesn't seem to matter.

What we get is a comedy that relates realistically to life, fashioned not with dozens of hilarious jokes but with due regard for proper storytelling.

Pixar will struggle to do better than this. It certainly wiped out the memory of humdrum mistakes like Shrek III.

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