Ratatouille (2007)1

—-By Peh YunLin In my opin­ion. It’s pure genius. The expres­sion “Words are not enough” does it no jus­tices. Thus I’m going to try my best to describe this deli­cious work of ART. Ratatouille just sets out to accom­plish so much, and it is almost there.The sto­ry­line seems sim­ply enough at first glance—A rat(REMY) try­ing to make it as a cook. The gen­eral theme would then be the theme used by almost all movies—A per­son of hum­ble ori­gins strug­gling to achieve some­thing seem­ingly out of his reach. But wait, even as this is explored, new themes emerged, and each looked at with amaz­ing depth. Family (Pixar’s must), Father-Son hardships(part of fam­ily), Bullies(Remy’s con­sid­ered a frail rat!), American and French(loads of both), the reach for the top and lose one self in the run(Remy does keep run­ning, I’m dizzy), our some­times scary con­science… Granted some of the lines seemed forced. But at one point, even the pat­tern of human evo­lu­tion is raised. You’ve got to raise your spoons to that.Ratatouille speaks to prac­ti­cally every­one in the audi­ence. It addresses and brings out the voices every­one. My favorite would be the voice of artists. It is brought out from the point of view of a food critic, Ego. When I lis­ten to his incred­i­ble mono­logue towards the end of the show, I felt like cry­ing. Those few lines cel­e­brated the great­est joy and regrets of all forms of artist. The insight given is enough to relate us, yet give us a deeper under­stand­ing of the artis­tic mind.And that’s just the dia­logue of the movie(sorry for­got to men­tion that).Editing of Ratatouille is most inter­est­ing. It is promi­nent. Its almost a mock­u­men­tary the first half of the film. Almost as if the direc­tor knows that we are all too famil­iar with the pat­terns of Act 1, he decides to sum­ma­rize and cut out basic assump­tions. In the tran­si­tion between Act 1 and Act 2, dur­ing the deal made between Remy and Linguni. Just when the scene gets a lit­tle cliché and we start to antic­i­pate what’s next, a jump cut is used. To most com­i­cal effect, but most impor­tantly, it cuts the audi­ence to the point, mov­ing the story along.Though I felt the dynamic actions in Ratatouille loses out to The Incredibles. The movie itself is just as action packed as The Incredibles. And, as we fol­low Remy’s flight through end­less obsta­cles, lit­tle irrel­e­vant sto­ries are strewed along the way. Like lit­tle gems, its up to you to find and savor them if you are not out of breath already. I know if when I watch Ratatouille on DVD, I’ll def­i­nitely notice some­thing I missed before. Such is the joy of watch­ing Ratatouille. You can see so much atten­tion paid, so many details crafted into each ele­ment and aspect of the ani­ma­tion. Just the awe alone, incurred by acknowl­edg­ing the mag­ni­tude of this con­coc­tion is, staggering.You have got your entire LIFE to regret if you don’t catch the amaz­ing chase scenes on the big screen. Granted there are a tad too many of those in the movie, but isn’t that how our poor friend, the rat, lives? And if you get 5^th/6^th row seats at a good cin­ema, I guar­an­tee you, a trip down the drain with Remy is even bet­ter then what Omni the­atre gives. Such is the impact of the col­lab­o­ra­tion between good visual and audio mix­down. Kudos to the sound designer who did the drain scene, every swish crash swirl and gur­gle run­ning together in a real­is­tic sym­phony. I can almost hear the glee­ful smile on his or her face at the sat­is­fac­tion of the final product.Thomaline Peh YunLin