Pixar, abetted by the talented Brad Bird ('The Incredibles'), outdistances and outdoes itself with 'Ratatouille' a bizarrely eccentric, richly inventive and altogether droll piece of computer animation. Would it be redundant - or too premature - to also call it the best film of the year? So what, It is.
Its a film where a provincial rat called Rémy swims to Paris by canal and sewer, dances around a top restaurant kitchen improving the soup he had thought of scavenging (but which goes out to wow the diners), then befriends young dishwasher Linguini, hiding inside this aspiring master-chef's hat and winning the hearts and touching the souls of hungry food-lovers. All in all, Disney-Pixar’s Ratatouille is a story of a four-pawed French garbage-eater who becomes a top Paris chef.
The first jaw dropper is the quality of the film’s images. Every spike of rat fur is vivid and gleaming; every crust of French bread is good enough to eat; every oozing, opalescent onion can be smelled and wept over. The second jaw dropper is the agility of the camera (or computer eye) as our gravity-free viewpoint whizzes up, down and around streets, cityscapes, landscapes, eateries.
The third jaw dropper, by which time we need help to recover our mandibles from the floor, is the sophisticated panache of the supporting characters. These are led by the restaurant’s jealous chef (voice of Ian Holm), a ball of venom with barking accent, and its most feared critic, Anton Ego (performed by Peter O’Toole), a fastidious fault-finder snobbish critic. In fact the scene in which Ego samples Remy’s ratatouille is the single best moment in the film and it rivals the moment when the father of Nemo (Finding Nemo) watches his son being trapped away.