Ratatouille
Some Thoughts on Tasteful and Tasty Animation
There are a lot of great animated films out there — the moving-graphic-novels like Persepolis, the Japanese masterpieces like Spirited Away. But when I think of animated film, my mind jumps to a clear and categorical best: Pixar.
Pixar means excellence approaching perfection. Rolex, Ferrari, and Robin Williams are among its peers in peerlessness.
I did some quick research and learned that the studio was co-founded by Steve Jobs. I was not surprised. When I pick up a new iPhone, I know I’m holding one of the best smartphones in the world. When I sit down for a Pixar movie, I know that the next two hours of my life are in safe hands.
A friend recently said, “I see that intro for a Pixar movie — the lamp hopping across the screen before jumping up and down on the letter ‘I’ — and a certain happiness comes over me at once. This is gonna be good.”
More impressive people have said basically the same thing; here’s David Denby, writing for The New Yorker:
The animation gang at Pixar don’t settle for goosing old fairy tales and shining up media-weary jokes, as the DreamWorks folks do in the Shrek series. They create each movie afresh, and some of their productions . . . have reached heights of invention, speed, and wit not seen in animation since the work done by Chuck Jones at Warner Bros. in the nineteen-forties.
In that 2007 article, Denby was reviewing Pixar’s latest home run, the murine and gastronomical marvel that is Ratatouille. Much of his focus centered on the skillful point-of-view camerawork that “jumps to the top of cabinets and scampers beneath ovens and counters.”
Denby is right about the perspective and the way it affects the storytelling, but this isn’t the part of the movie that stood out to me when I watched it a decade ago or when I watched it a day ago.
Movies work primarily on two senses — your vision and your audition. But film can’t go beyond the seen or the heard. (Not yet anyways. Movie buffs are still waiting on the Feelies we read about in Brave New World.) And film certainly has no capacity to carry smell or taste. This is why I’m always confused by The Food Network. The point of food is either substance or taste, and live-action recording can offer neither.
Animation is another beast.
There’s a scene in Ratatouille where Remy — a young, talking rat with superhuman (superrodent?) taste buds — holds a sort of sampling in a Parisian back alley. He closes his eyes, and the scenery behind him falls black. Remy takes a bite of strawberry, and pink stars begin to burst around him like bubbles in seltzer. Remy takes a bite of Gruyère and angular shapes with hard lines spring up around him. Then Remy takes a bite of both foods as the sweet and savory, the fruity and the smoky, dance around him in dashes and waves of reds and yellows, coming together to make a palate of tastes through a pallet of colors.
So powerful was this visualization of taste that — when I first watched the movie — I ran downstairs to imitate. I couldn’t find strawberries or Gruyère, so I settled for American cheese and raspberries. Surely, I thought, these will be close enough.
Author’s Note: Eating a slice of American cheese and a handful of raspberries at the same time makes you wish you were dead.
This translation of taste happens again and again in Ratatouille. At one point a female chef explains French bread to a beginner. Their conversation goes like this:
Colette: How do you tell how good bread is without tasting it? Not the smell, not the look, but the sound of the crust. Listen.
She presses the bread between her hands, holding it closer to Linguini’s ear.
Colette: Oh, symphony of crackle. Only great bread sound this way.
Here, the animators are able to translate both taste and texture through noise. And they do so in a way almost cognizant of the medium. Colette asks, “How do you tell how good bread is without tasting it?” The Pixar team might well have asked: How do we show how good bread is without taste? Colette answers her own question just as the Pixar team might have answered theirs: Not the smell, not the the look, but the sound of the crust. Listen.
Trivia: The film’s “annihilating restaurant critic” Anton Ego is voiced by Peter O’Toole.
More trivia? Thomas Keller — the famous American chef of The French Laundry, Bouchon, etc. — was the movie’s food consultant. Director Brad Bird interned in Keller’s kitchen for three days during the research phase. It was Keller who developed the confit byaldi used in the climax of the film. Reading about the movie, it became apparent that Keller had quite a hand in the film, especially in the way that the food was “drawn” for animation. Keller helped animators focus less on generating food as it looks, but as it tastes.
Ratatouille is a testament to the powers of animation. The ability to capture taste and smell and texture in film is remarkable. With enough wit, skill, and imagination the sky’s the limit. But sometimes infinities come with caveats.
Chuck Jones said, “You can do anything with animation.” He’s right. Even the impossible task of relaying taste through film is possible. By its nature, animation is more formalist than live action. The unabridged quote from Jones is actually, “You can do anything with animation, and so the question is not what should you do, but what shouldn’t you do.” One thing I love about Pixar is that they don’t overuse the powers of animation. A philosophy of reservation makes the movie more approachable and the artistic flexes even greater.
Toques off to you, Pixar.