On pleasure, kindness, expertise, and animated rats.
You know, that scene! Remy closes his eyes and tastes a bit of cheese. Horns and percussion burst in yellow bubbles around him. He savours a bite of strawberry, and pink lines draw out the sound of an accordeon. He tastes both at the same time, and the whole world bursts into fireworks. That’s it! That’s the scene. The only thing that tops it is when Remy tries to make his brother, Emile, understand. Emile tastes a tiny bit of cheese, and the darkness breaks, just for a moment, to let a dim pulse of yellow through. He nibbles at a grape, cautiously, and hears a soft, trilling purple. He bites into both, and for a brief moment, the colours dance for him as they did for Remy, before he loses focus, and they melt away. It’s the best scene, the best thirty seconds of animation Disney has ever produced.
Remy’s the protagonist of the movie, the usual Disney/Pixar hero, a prodigy with big dreams. Like most misunderstood geniuses, he wants to be understood, or, at least, for others to understand that he is a genius. He’s pushy and impatient with Emile, waving his paws in exasperation, raising his nose to the sky as though trying to conduct the stars, even while he purports to communicate with his brother. The film itself sees Emile with kinder eyes, treats him with more care. When I first saw Ratatouille, when I was nine, I didn’t relate to him. At age nine, everyone’s Remy. Now, I love Emile (just like I love Linguini, the millennial icon with an unfathomable mutation that links two strands of ginger hair to his central nervous system, and whose wishlist includes: a rest, a job that isn’t minimum wage, and an extremely hot and Frenchly scary girlfriend). My favourite thing about Emile is how hard he tries to understand his brother, even if Remy doesn’t notice. Emile mocks his brother; when Remy asks if he can taste the nuttiness of the cheese, Emile smirks and side-eyes him with an “oh, I’m detecting nuttiness”. Ultimately, though, Emile’s too impressed by his brother to humour him in any patronizing way. He rolls his eyes, but then makes a genuine effort to bite into the cheese and grape slowly, rather than horking it down like his other food. He listens as hard as he can while a single bass string plucks out the taste of the cheese to him. The purple and yellow even begin to splatter out and dance for him, while Remy rants on about combining every taste, unintentionally distracting Emile until the colours melt away from him again.
Brad Bird, the film’s director, is famous for his incessant need to make the animated form fit whatever content he’s cooked up — this is a nice way of saying he’s a bit of a dick who drives his animators nuts — but it’s kind of worth it. In this scene, it definitely is. Bird got Michel Gagné, who worked with him on The Iron Giant, to animate the shapes and swirls that map out Remy and Emile’s taste experiences. Gagné has sound-colour synaesthesia, a neurological condition that links sensory experiences, making him able to “see” music, and also making him perfect for animating this scene. Like Gusteau, famous chef and Remy’s idol, tells him, “good food is music you can taste, colour you can smell. There is excellence all around you. You need only be aware to stop and savour it.” Remy already has all the prerequisites to understand what Gusteau is telling him, he already is obsessed with taste. The true proof that “anyone can cook”, as Gusteau says, or that anyone can taste, is Emile. Synaesthesia is crucial to this understanding because it’s a condensation of sensory experiences, and it’s things working in tandem when they shouldn’t be (sound and colour; a rat and good taste; Emile and good taste; animation and taste; you, the viewer, and enjoying what the rats are tasting). Emile is a rat with no special abilities, trying to appreciate food because he loves his brother. When Anton Ego, the critic with a face like a vulture and a heart like a dried fig, eats ratatouille and remembers tasting it as a kid, he remembers that he was never fated to become a critic. Before he chose to become one, he didn’t know anything, he, like Emile, was nothing but a guest to a skilled cook. He remembers pleasure, unrefined, and maybe unburdened, by expertise.
In 2010, Michel Gagné was shortlisted for an Academy Award for his animated short, Sensology. It’s six minutes of black and white shapes, flitting across the screen while the music of Paul Plimley and Barry Guy plays. Well, not while it plays; the shapes seem to be dragging the music out of the aether, moving in perfect concert with them. The short isn’t for everyone. It has a 6/10 rating on IMDb, because it’s a black and white abstract representation of some Canadian guy’s synaesthetic experience of avant-garde jazz, so I don’t blame you if you decide to skip this paragraph. But it’s insane, and it’s stunning. Some of the shapes bang against each other like hammers, giving you the impression that the whole short is a Rube-Goldberg-machine, every note, every shape eliciting the next. The thing about these shapes is that they aren’t two-dimensional — they cast shadows. The film, and the music, are three-dimensional space. They’re an invitation for you to step inside. Be Emile. Be an idiot who knows nothing about avant-garde jazz, or food, or your brother. Dare to be kind to these incomprehensible entities. I sat and stared at my laptop screen for six minutes and felt like every lopsided square, every slanting note was being pulled from my chest before darting across the screen. At our best, we are Emile, with maybe a pinch more self-awareness (though Emile must be forgiven for that, because he is, after all, a rat).
In Ratatouille, the characters are constantly being invited to enjoy. To experience pleasure. In their search for expertise, to understand the mechanics of pleasure, they get caught up in the complexities of it, hypnotized by the coloured spirals that their tastes draw, until they forget what their first experience, and their ultimate goal was. (After I first saw this movie in 2007, in my search for perfect taste, I ate wild rice with mayo, rosemary, and blueberries. The quest for pleasure sometimes takes us to dark places.) Linguini gets caught up in his fame, Remy alienates everyone around him, Ego shrivels in the bitterness of his criticism. They all have to go back to basics, back to the gut punch of the first time they tasted something delicious, they laughed at a friend’s joke, their mother consoled them. Emile, a virtuous fool, stays the same, enjoys easily, keeps trying to be kind.
This isn’t an indictment of expertise, just like Ratatouille isn’t. It’s an appreciation of kindness, and the attempt to understand, even when you probably can’t. Which, with a pinch of self-awareness, is probably what expertise is anyway. That one scene of Ratatouille is so full of present tense pleasure, and simultaneously so careful in its taking of pleasure. It takes French gastronomy, like Sensology takes jazz, and boils it down to something that affects you so viscerally that you realize you’ve already tasted it. The movie’s so careful because it’s tasted pleasure before, and while it’s meticulous about not spilling a drop (because Brad Bird would kill it otherwise), it still wants to indulge, uncritically. It’s about pleasure, and the memory of pleasure. There’s a sharp, and not unkind, understanding to how the movie treats itself, and you, because it knows you’ll get it. You’ve already got it. The movie, and you, are tasting strawberries and cheese like Remy does when you were nine years old, and then you’re turning twenty and understanding that you were seeing Emile’s fireworks all along. It’s about food, music, and motion, and the occasional difficulty of understanding our friends and siblings, before we realize how often they work to do the same for us.
