Ratatouille

That feeling you have as you leave the cinema - that buzzing in the fingers and lightness in the heart - is called joy.

Bird is one of the great modern animators -- as well as an astonishingly gifted filmmaker, period -- precisely because he doesn't set out to wow us.

If there is a genius working in Hollywood today, it's animation director Brad Bird, who tops the delightful "The Incredibles" with arguably the finest 'toon in the Pixar canon, Ratatouille.

Ratatouille is delicious. In this satisfying, souffle-light tale of a plucky French rodent with a passion for cooking, the master chefs at Pixar have blended all the right ingredients -- abundant verbal and visual wit, genius slapstick timing, a soupcon of Gallic sophistication -- to produce a warm and irresistible concoction that's sure to appeal to everyone's inner Julia Child.

Ratatouille is as much a feast for the senses as it is food for thought.

Like the best French cuisine, Ratatouille is ambitious and delightful.

Ratatouille is a blithe concoction, as well as a miraculously textured piece of animated design.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Ratatouille, a Walt Disney animated movie, was a decent watch. While watching it, I was reminded of the Telugu film Ninnila Ninnila. For me, the highlight was definitely the last half hour. That part stood out the most.

Pixar stuffs a foodie rat under the toque of a wannabe chef with one foot (barely) in the door at a fading gourmet restaurant. The rodent was weaned on cooking TV shows, the human represents the end of a celebrity chef’s bloodline, and together they manage just enough culinary magic to raise a ruckus in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Ratatouille’s scenery is enchanting and its food is mouth-watering, but its core ingredients are rather thin. Neither Remy (the rat) nor Alfredo (the man-child) enjoy an especially deep or involved character arc, two cases of WYSIWYG given flesh, and Pixar seems to recognize this, crowding the scenery with all manner of half-hearted side dishes to compensate. I was hardly surprised to learn of a shakeup behind the scenes, with original director and screenwriter Jan Pinkava ousted in favor of then-ascendant studio bigwig Brad Bird. Despite the late shift, this still feels like an unfocused draft. The technical team does its job well - Alfredo’s physical comedy is riotous, Remy’s all-too-limited tasting scenes are bright and imaginative, the city and kitchen both look gorgeous - but it all feels a little wasted without a more substantial base. I recognize and appreciate the irony of critiquing a movie in which a snobby food critic is the big bad. Wish I could say that my second viewing, and first in around a decade, could’ve provided me with the same kind of big revelation that my on-screen counterpart enjoys. Instead, I must confess that Ratatouille still lives in precisely the same place I left it. Enjoyable but very light, and a far cry from the kind of potent, accomplished material we expected of Pixar at the time. My preceding review from 2014: One of the few Pixar movies I hadn't yet seen. Like each of their other films, this is witty, beautiful and genuine, but in the end feels like light fare compared to some of the studio's masterworks. It doesn't have the suspense of The Incredibles, the heart of Up or the scale of Wall-E, for example, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy it. The script enjoys a few big, family-friendly laughs, the animation shows some real inspiration (I appreciated the visualizations of competing/combining flavors) and it gets points for the unique setting, but it never really finds that essential moment where everything shifts into overdrive. Ah, well. My least favorite Pixar effort is still better than most of the competition.

I honestly walked away from this feeling largely indifferent. The plot doesn't do anything unexpected, The characters are typical tropes. TBH, I just didn't care for this movie at all.

Rat propoganda