The most recent screening in my blockbuster cinema course here at Columbia has given me the insightful opportunity of analyzing a childhood classic: Ratatouille. The experience was different in that, unlike with older or foreign films, I watched with the strange sense of familiarity. Contrary to my passive movie-going nature, I often found myself prepared for the punchline or quoting the dialogue—hopefully not to the annoyance of the poor student next to me. Sorry, after years of letting it play in the background whenever it came on TV, I was far too acquainted, and I just couldn’t help myself. Even so, I was struck by little details about the movie that I hadn’t noticed before, specifically its underlying evocation of dance.
As Walt Disney Animation Studios became known for its romantic musicals such as Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, focusing mostly on young women and their inevitable falling for handsome men they meet, Pixar, in an effort to differentiate themselves, pointedly avoided these tropes and resolved to make their own style of storytelling. For years, they abided by this rule with surprising success. Although the occasional couple did make it onto the screen—with Wall-E and EVE, Carl and Ellie, and even Woody and Little Bo Peep—these films did not revolve around courtship but rather, themes of nostalgia and family.
And yet, even while they were not making romances or musicals, the importance of music never went overlooked in Pixar films. With Academy Award-winning original song “If I Didn’t Have You” from Monsters, Inc., Toy Story’s classic “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”, and the moving score that reinforced the unending love story of Up, the studio proved their ability to create affect with its poignant compositions. This is no less true with Ratatouille, through which composer Michael Giacchino continued his work with Brad Bird after scoring The Incredibles in 2005. The inspiration he draws from French music leads him to a series of compositions that range from the soft and whimsical to the energetic and jocular, masterfully guiding the audience through the emotional journeys of both main characters.
Having already established their knack for music, what felt more ambitious about Ratatouille was the movement of its characters. Pixar’s growing skill with CGI came from a history of trial-and-error; many of its earlier works, while revolutionary and highly praised, may appear rigid to the modern viewer. Their preceding feature films demonstrate their hesitance through the limiting of animated human characters, focusing instead on the worlds of insects, fish, monsters, and automobiles. Though anthropomorphic, their bodies do not pose the same risk of the uncanny valley, the uneasiness that results from failed resemblance to an actual human being. But the animators challenged themselves, through these films, to explore more and more the merging of the technology and their own creative abilities. In Ratatouille, they experiment by bringing their animation in the human world, revolving the film around not just a rat but the many Parisians whom he comes across, including Linguini, the awkward young man who takes up about as much screen time as his rodent counterpart.
The fluid motion of these characters, both rat and human, is a point of emphasis throughout the film, accentuated even in brief shots like Collette’s twirling slip while rollerblading across the bridge. They are capable of an astonishing flexibility compared to that of humans in films like Toy Story (1992) and even Finding Nemo (2003), using the plasticity of their animation to their advantage. The scene in which Linguini twists like a dog chasing his tail to grab a letter from his pocket, as well as that in which he dips almost elastically under a waiter’s tray, comes across as the proud and well-earned boasting of the animators’ successes with the evolution of their computer animation.
It is the coming together of these moments of fluidity and the film’s playful score that bring Ratatouille to life, especially in Remy’s puppeteering of Linguini in the kitchen. As they cook together for the first time in Linguini’s apartment, their lack of coordination slowly turns to harmony as they are accompanied by a lighthearted buddy theme. By the end, Remy is successfully manipulating Linguini’s hands to crack eggs, smoothly pouring and whisking and catching a container of salt as it falls off the counter. Through rhythmic carrot chops and crepe flips, the pair introduces something rather performative and dancelike in the film’s approach to cooking that carries throughout. It is noticeable, for example, when Colette scolds Linguini for the way he wastes time cutting vegetables; the synchrony of the music with her quick speech and rapid cutting of celery accentuate the agility of a good chef. This is again emphasized in Remy’s taking over the kitchen near to the climax of the film, wherein he designates tasks and stations to his fellow rats as they help prepare meals. The teams are well-coordinated, each performing their own kind of dance, cooking through unconventional methods like surfing pads of butter onto pans and riding blocks of cheese down a slide they’ve made from a grater. Their harmonious movements in the kitchen are complemented by Linguini’s graceful waiting of tables in roller-skates after his entire staff abandons him. His quick turns and agile filling up of wine glasses while he brings guests their meals all hint at a kind of choreography.
The scene which stood out to me the most was Remy’s remedying of the soup on his first night in Gusteau’s kitchen. He scurries among the ingredients, occasionally jumping over the pot with grand ballet-like leaps as he tosses in sprinklings of salt, garlic, and minced vegetables; all the while the music picks up and swells with his growing enthusiasm until he is caught by Linguini. Here, in this dance-like ode to cooking, the audience realizes that the true romance in this film is not between Linguini and Colette but between Remy and food, which is also represented in posters made for the film that feature Remy dipping a carrot much like one would a female dance partner.
Good blockbusters arouse the senses of the audience, whether this is through the fight scenes of James Bond or the dance numbers of Moulin Rouge. Whereas its predecessors were more rooted in adventure, as in Cars and Monsters Inc., the journey of Ratatouille is in the romanticized artistry and craft of cooking. The filmmakers arouse the senses of the audience with Remy’s moments of food appreciation, relating the experience through colorful bursts and swirls that reflect the jazzy tunes associated with different ingredients like fruit and cheese. This synesthetic experience relating food and music is stressed even within the film itself, by Colette who tells Linguini that he can tell good bread not by the smell or look but by the sound, which she refers to as a “symphony of crackles,” and by Gusteau as he claims in an interview at the beginning of the film that “good food is like music you can taste, color you can smell.”
While it involves no explicit singing or dancing, Ratatouille has the most musical potential of any of Pixar’s films before Coco’s release in 2017. This potential was explored by composers Dan and Laura Curtis in a series of theatrical numbers they created with stills from the film, which are not only wonderfully imaginative but also beg the question: when is Disney going to revisit this classic and turn one rat’s big dream into a Broadway hit?
Caterina Viscito is a sophomore in Columbia College.