Ratatouille and the future of Pixar

After seeing the by the numbers Shrek the Third and the overblown Pirates 3, I was losing hope for summer movies. Fortunately my bad streak has ended with Ratatouille, from the ever dependable Pixar (who are now eight for eight in my book). However, the relatively low opening weekend box office returns (< $50 million vs. > $125 million for Shrek 3, Spiderman 3 or Pirates 3) for Ratatouille had me a bit depressed. Won't Pixar now be pressured into producing lowest common denominator movies and sequels as the only possible way that Disney can recover the gazillions they paid out?

Fortunately Pixar's reply to this question is a defiant "never", and this message is not so subtly encoded in the film's plot. The following discussion is for people who have already seen the film; however, I'll provide enough information so anyone can follow and will include mild spoilers. My thesis is that the story of Ratatouille is actually the Disney-Pixar story. Because Brad Bird and Pixar are mostly concerned with making a superb movie, they don't push the allegory too far; however, the message is there and it is defiant.

The primary action in Ratatouille takes place in Gousteau's restaurant. Gousteau was the greatest chef in Paris, and had a populist streak appearing on television to explain the tricks of his trade to the public. After Gousteau's death the restaurant was never the same, despite the good efforts of many in the kitchen. Gousteau's restaurant sounds a bit like Walt Disney Studios with Gousteau as Walt. The new chef, Skinner (Michael Eisner perhaps?), is mainly interested in extracting as much money as possible from Gousteau's name and is about to market a variety of rather cheesy sounding frozen food products (direct-to-video sequels?).

The hero of the movie, Remy the rat, is a true artist in the kitchen and he single handedly turns Gousteau's around through his innovations in the kitchen. When the staff discovers that Remy is responsible for the restaurant's new success, they quit en masse, and Remy must employ his entire rat colony in the enterprise. Although the rats create a masterpiece for the critic Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O'Toole), the restaurant is closed after the health inspector discovers rats in the kitchen. However, in the happy ending the heroes of the film open a bistro for both rats and humans, where excellent food is prepared and Anton Ego is a regular.

Incidentally, the process where seemingly hundreds of rats prepare the meal is not unlike the process of animation itself, where countless people make small but fundamental contributions to the painstaking process with the artist, Remy (Brad Bird?), in charge.

There are two major lessons which are spelled out for us by the film; the fact they are so blatantly spelled out is one of the few bits of pandering the movie makes to the younger set. The first is that pursuing ones calling as an artist must take supremacy over most other considerations - it's better to pursue excellence in a bistro than mediocrity in a fine dining establishment. To me, this moral is defiantly telling the viewer that Pixar will resist the temptation to sink to the lowest common denominator, and will create art on their own terms. The second lesson is that although not everyone can create great art, great art can come from anyone and anywhere. This lesson has nothing to do with the Pixar-Disney situation, but in part addresses the rivalry between animators (the rats) and live-action filmmakers (the human cooks). The reflexive dismissal of animation as an inferior art is attacked in this message, but the most effective attack is presented by the existence of this wonderful film.

Top Ten Movies that aren't on your List

Compared to the other film enthusiasts in the blogosphere, I'm an amateur among amateurs; however, among my friends, I'm the movie expert. I'm often asked about my favorite movies. Many of my favorites are pretty standard: Sunset Boulevard, Lawrence of Arabia, Chinatown, etc. It's almost pointless to list them. Here are 10 of the best American movies that most people don't put on their lists. I'll have to think some more about favorite foreign films.

1. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933). The Busby Berkeley boxed set came out a year ago and it was a revelation. I'd heard about these movies and seen clips, but nothing quite prepared me. Between the pre-code shenanigans and the choreographed human kaleidoscopes, this movie is simply a good time. 42nd Street and Footlight Parade were close contenders for this spot.


2. The Lady Eve (1942). Sullivan's Travels is most often cited as Sturges' masterpiece, but its sentimental streak keeps it from being ranked among my favorites, which include this choice, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (which brilliantly outmaneuvers the Hays code), and The Palm Beach Story. The Lady Eve wins out because of the star appeal of Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck. See this and you'll weep over the current state of the romantic comedy genre (you may want to support this cause)

3. White Heat (1949). The early gangster movies (The Public Enemy, Scarface, and Little Caesar) are fun to watch, but seem like cultural artifacts compared to White Heat, which gets to us at a visceral level. James Cagney plays the psychopathic Cody Jarrett who may love his mother a little too much.

4. Strangers on a Train (1951) The equal of any of the usually cited Hitchcock masterpieces (e.g. Psycho, Vertigo), this may be his most perfectly constructed thriller. Robert Walker is Hitchcock's greatest villain (not only does he love his mother, he wants Farley Granger to kill his father). Hitchcock hits all of his obsessions: mothers, an innocent man wrongfully accused, and the darkness within us all.

5. Sweet Smell of Success (1957) "A cookie filled with arsenic" is used by Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) to describe J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), but the phrase is also an apt description of this especially dark and cynical noir tale. James Wong Howe's black and white cinematography, Ernest Lehman's script, Elmer Bernstein's jazzy score, Ernest Lehman's sharp script and Alexander Mackendrick's (who didn't make enough movies) direction prove that film is a collaborative medium.

6. The Music Man (1962). I wanted to include one movie you can watch with your three year old (Dumbo was my second choice). Conventional wisdom is that the musical died when the Arthur Freed unit closed down at MGM, and the big 3-hour cinemascope Broadway-based extravaganzas killed the musical. Actually, they kept the musical alive financially, and a few of them were pretty good. This one (along with the more commonly listed My Fair Lady) is nearly perfect, and preserves Robert Preston's career defining role for all time.

7. One, Two, Three (1962). One of funniest movies ever made, its frenetic pace and total irreverence was ahead of its time, foreshadowing the work of Mel Brooks and the Zucker-Abrahams team. Billy Wilder tackles many of the issues he explored as a screenwriter for Ninotchka (an also ran for this list), skewering both communism and capitalism but saving his most vicious digs for the Germans (all of whom claim to have been part of the resistance). James Cagney fires off the mile minute jokes as a Coca-Cola executive in Berlin. How Billy Wilder got Coca-Cola to go along with this movie is a complete mystery.

8. All that Jazz (1979). 1979 was the year I first got interested in movies as something more than entertainment. In addition to the classics, I remember loving All that Jazz (which I saw twice in its opening month), Apocalypse Now, Being There and Manhattan. All that Jazz is Bob Fosse's 8 and 1/2, except Fosse uses fantasy and musical sequences to draw us in at an emotional level, whereas Fellini's fantasies just make us wonder what the hell he's trying to get at.

9. Repo Man (1984). I don't know if it's my advancing age or the decline of the repertory cinema, but it seems they don't make cult movies like they used to. This is the best of them.

10. The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). From 1980 to 1999, one of the events I looked forward to most was the opening of the year's Woody Allen movie. Even when his movies weren't up to snuff, they never felt like a waste of time. Strangely, his latest efforts have been both less ambitious and less likely to fulfill their ambitions. Allen doesn't appear in this one; Mia Farrow is his surrogate, a star struck fan who is literally drawn into the fantasy world of a depression era movie. The under-appreciated Radio Days was another candidate for this spot.

11. A. I. (2001) This is number 11, but who's counting? Spielberg’s amazing run of great movies in the 2000's is reminiscent of Hitchcock in the 1950's; A. I. is Spielberg’s Vertigo, an under-appreciated masterpiece that will eventually be revered. With the exception of an ill-advised coda, this is a great movie about what it means to be human with a chilling and heartbreaking performance by Haley Joel Osment.