Ratatouille

What the hell is Pixar thinking? I mean, rats. Rats in the kitchen. Rats with human-like faces in the kitchen, cooking the food. I don’t have any phobias concerning rats, but this thing made me queasy. It might be that (for me) Pixar is getting too good at what it does—visually. On a narrative level, it was just more of the Pixar cookie-cutter narrative: natter, natter, natter … go for your dreams … friends are cool. In Ratatouille, a rat gets swept up and dumped in the kitchen of a five-star restaurant struggling to keep its rating. He hooks up with a trashcan man and the two set out to score their dreams together. And yeah, there’s a girl involved. The animation was incredibly well done … to the point where it evoked The Uncanny, as Freud described it, where the ordinary takes a sudden detour into the extraordinary, yet still maintains the comfortable trappings. Pixar takes that route by creating things that should not be and giving them a photo-realistic presence. Like rats with human-like faces. I’m probably the only person to give this thing a bad rating—this is one really big case of Mileage May Vary.