Ratatouille Analysis

Ratatouille

Directed by: Brad Bird

A PIXAR film

Academy Award for Best Animated Feature 2007.

If there's one thing that Pixar's films are teaching me as a person, it's empathy. We empathize with a grumpy old man in Up, we empathize with a fish in Finding Nemo and now with a rat in Ratatouille. The plot of Ratatouille has a strong sense of irony, where they have a character, a rat, which is almost an opposite of what kitchens are meant for, pleasant smell and tasty food and we look at rats with disgust, as Hans Landa rightly pointed out. Here, we see a rat, Remy who wants to cook and become a chef. As the plot has irony, we root for the characters more because this won't happen otherwise and this comes to play when Remy is facing hardships and he tells himself, 'I'm after all a rat. Maybe I was too ambitious', we be like, 'No, common. You can do it, you came this far', and that's how we root for the character more.

American films have always played the underdog role in food films, citing that French and Italian cuisines are considered the best in the world and we'll prove you wrong. They also did this in Julie and Julia and they did this badly in Ford vs Ferrari where they almost created villains out of the opponents. Here, we don't see much of that. Although we see pretentious food critics and the culture of how critics can make or break the business of a restaurant. In spite of this being an animated film, I got the sense of Paris while watching the film mostly because of the music and the color palette. Food films are a sub-genre of slice of life films and I wish they made more of these films, because it's almost feels therapeutic. Chef was a such a beautiful film. We also have travel films like that, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Into the Wild, Ye Jawani Hai Deewani. The difference between fiction food/travel films and food/travel documentaries is that we have flawed characters having character arcs over the journey they take in the film, which is satisfying to watch because in reality it is tough to notice changes in ourselves while we are changing as people.