Ratatouille (2007)

Food is fuel. You get picky about what you put in your tank, your engine is gonna die. Now shut up and eat your garbage.

— Django

Ratatouille is currently number 154 of the top 250 of all time on IMDB. I have to disagree highly with the praise that movie has gotten. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature against Persepolis and Surf’s Up. I did not see the latter, but it must have been slim pickings that year if the movie won.

The movie centers around Remy (Patton Oswalt), a rat that has impeccable palate for good food and different combinations of tastes. He lives with his nest family in the roof of an old lady’s house.

His father, Django (Brian Dennehy) wants his son to be a thief like his other son, Emile (Peter Sohn) and himself. Remy doesn’t want that. He wants to be a world famous chef like his hero, Chef Gusteau (Brad Garrett).

One day, he hears news that Gusteau died when he lost a star from his five-star restaurant. Also, the nest is discovered when Remy and Emile were trying to scour for food.

As usual, Remy is separated from the nest and he ends up at Gusteau’s restaurant. Imagine that. He helps out a bumbling, flailing guy, Linguini (Lou Romano) to help bring out his creations.

Hilarity ensues and the move falls out the rails so much that I had to turn it off.

Here are my major problems with the movie:

• I have an issue with a family, even if they’re rats, being from Paris and none of them have the slightest accent.
• Why would you let a rat cook? Whose idea with this?
• Why did Linguini tell that cook that he doesn’t when in a scene ten minutes before he was sipping wine with Remy?
• How it is physiologically possible control a person’s movements by hair?

Are you kidding me, Pixar? Are we suppose to buy this dreck? What happened to the Finding Nemos, the Toy Storys of yesteryear? We have to deal with convoluted plots with ridiculous characters and situations that is supposed to be heartwarming. Spare me!

Judgment: There are some genuine laughs, but it’s not worth getting invested in it.

Rating: **1/2