This collection of interviews, reviews and features originally ran in the June 26 Volume section of the West Valley View.
Pixar’s latest dazzler is all about food. Not hot dogs, toaster pastries and microwave burritos, but serious cuisine, entrées with long-winded French names that come in miniature portions on oversized plates with drizzled sauces — one ingredient is required to be fois gras.
Don’t send your dinner jacket to dry cleaning yet. At the end of Ratatouille, it’s a simple recipe — a peasant food; the American translation would be cheesy macaroni from a box — that’s transformed tenfold to win our hearts and, more importantly, our stomachs. It wouldn’t be a stretch to layer this theme onto cinema itself: Pixar’s simple, story-driven pictures are not just run-of-the-mill menu items anymore, but the food equivalent of culinary art.
“It’s dangerous when we start talking themes. We don’t make films with the intention of teaching you something, or having a theme bring you a message,” the film’s producer, Brad Lewis, said. “But if you look at this and see it as a metaphor for life, or friends, or film … then that makes me happy. Obviously, you can pull anything from this that you want.”
Director Brad Bird chimed in with a food allegory: “A really good hamburger is just as fine as a filet mignon. What something is about does not define the quality of it. A comic strip like Peanuts can be as profound as any good book.”
Ratatouille, which carries Pixar’s most complex story to date, is about a rat, Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), who stumbles into France looking for his family. He finds Linguini (Lou Romano), a human, who is working in a famed French restaurant known for its bisque, which Linguini fouls up. Linguini, it would seem, can’t cook, but Remy can. They enlist each other — the rat invents the recipes, the human makes them — to win over a morose food critic whose office is in the shape of a coffin.
The movie is directed and co-written by Bird, the creative force behind two recent animated movies involving humans — The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. Bird has, twice in a row, featured humans at Pixar, a studio that has only animated toys, fish, monsters and bugs before him.
“People are scared off by humans because we know how humans move … it’s not a mystery to us anymore,” Bird said. “I’ve always been fascinated with animating humans because it’s difficult. In Ratatouille, these aren’t life-like humans; they’re caricatures. And it was really fun to watch them develop.”
And a footnote: “This is also my first talking critter movie.”
Indeed, the critters do talk, but in his defense, they talk only to themselves. So when a human walks in on a rat conservation he only hears tiny squeaks and chirps. The illusion that humans talk human and rats talk rat is preserved, even with the anomaly of Remy, who seems to understand dialects of rat, human and food.
In the film, Remy helps steer the rather inept Linguini in the kitchen by hiding under his toque (a French chef’s hat) and pulling on tufts of his red hair as if they were reins. This presented an animation problem: how to convincingly illustrate hair. If his hair is too stiff Linguini runs the risk of looking like a Backstreet Boy minus the frosting; too floppy and it’ll dangle loosely on his digital scalp. The answer, Lewis said, was partially answered in a previous Pixar film, Monsters Inc., which featured a giant monster covered from horns to toes in purple and blue fur that matted when wet, moved when touched and swayed when blown upon.
“The fur on the Sully character in Monsters Inc. was a precursor to us understanding how hair and fur can be done this time out. I’m no animator, but I know it was no easy process,” Lewis said. “This film builds on the shoulders of other great Pixar films. From the fur, the hair, the water, the open flames in the kitchen … we can’t take credit for understanding these things without the films that came before us.”
Bird acknowledges the difficulties on the movie, but said they were important to telling a story.
“Water’s really hard to do on a computer. But for us, our movie wasn’t set on the ocean like Finding Nemo or Surf’s Up, which I haven’t seen yet. So water wasn’t a big concern. Even the hair played a minimal role,” he said. “For this movie we just really wanted to make the food look good.”
And food is the core element to Ratatouille, which is itself a food, a vegetable dish considered to be a simple and modest staple to a French diet. Much of the movie is spent in a kitchen drizzling sauces over plates, pinching herbs into pots, dicing vegetables and it has several memorable scenes at the edges of a spoon or fork where food meets mouth, or vice versa. The film had technical help from Thomas Keller, chef and owner of Northern California’s French Laundry, an ultra-exclusive (reservations must be made month in advance) restaurant known for its exquisite . Keller provided some inside expertise, said one of the Brads (Brad Lewis).
“One thing we had to fly by the seat of our pants on was food. This is the first time that computer animation has done first-rate food. We didn’t want it to be photo real; we wanted artistic, wonderful food that evokes appetite,” Lewis said. “If you leave hungry, then I guess it was done correctly.”
Tales from a dirty ratOnce upon a time, Patton Oswalt received a phone call. On the other line a voice relayed: “You’re the rat.” And then all was good in the comedian’s world. The end.
At least with that chapter.
Oswalt, a comedian known for his railings on Bush and religion, was asked to voice Remy, the rat and star in Ratatouille. Volume sat down with him to discuss the film, food and rats, but not necessarily in that order.
Volume: Have you ever been to Phoenix before?
Patton Oswalt: My grandma lives in Tempe, Ari., so I come here all the time, especially when I was a little kid. I really like it here because it kinda feels like you’re on a moon colony … things are so bleached and clean. And I really love the desert at night. I love how when it’s really hot everyone just locks themselves in their homes to escape the heat. Sure, Hispanics have their siestas, but everyone else does a very-Caucasian version of a siesta and they’ll crank the AC, jump in the pool and then come in and watch games shows on TV. The heat is just inescapable and I’ve always found it nice to chill out indoors.
Volume: How do you get picked for voicing a rat?
PO: I heard that Brad Bird was listening to one my comedy albums and he said, “That’s the rat.” [Bird confirmed this, saying Patton is “as funny as he thinks he is.”]
Volume: Is that weird someone thinks of you as a rat’s voice?
PO: Oh, it’s totally flattering. I’ve loved Brad Bird’s work way back to his days on The Simpsons and Iron Giant. I’ve been a Pixar fan since Luxo for crying out loud. I asked myself, “Was this a dream come true?” No! Because this was so ridiculously beyond any of my dreams that I never thought it would ever ever happen. I would have been happy with so much less than this.
Volume: How much less?
PO: If I would have had one line I would have still taken it. If all I said was “give me that pot” in the background I would be blogging about how awesome it was right now.
Volume: Have you had the dish ratatouille?
PO: It’s delicious. It’s a very basic peasant dish — it’s tomato sauce and savory vegetables all grilled and cooked. It’s great. It’s like succotash or chili or pot roast in that it’s cheap and can feed your whole family. That’s why the movie works: because the dish is so simple. Think about it, anybody could make filet mignon or black truffles taste amazing. But if you can take a ribeye or a haddock and make it amazing that’s the sign of a great chef. If you can elevate something that much, you’re good.
Volume: Are you getting any stories for your stand-up from this experience?
PO: I’ve been doing a lot of kids press because of this movie. That’s when I realized how much I use cynicism and negativity just to communicate in the world. With kids you have to be really positive. It’s almost painful. They ask, [in a child’s voice] “Did you like working with Brad Bird?” I respond: “It was really really fun” as blood drips from my ears. It’s like my head’s coming apart.
Context-free thoughts from Janeane G.
Janeane Garafalo voices a sultry French chef in Ratatouille. Talking with her about just one topic is impossible. Here are some context-free examples from our uproarious conversation:
• “It’s not horrible, like, working in a salt mine, especially since it’s elective.”
• “No one makes anyone go into entertainment.”
• “Getting up at 4:15 in the morning to be on Good Morning Utah is not the highlight of my career.”
• “Apparently the timbre and tone of my voice is what people want.”
• “I haven’t been to France so I had a CD with a French guy speaking English, but then I lost that. So then I started watching CNN International because they have an anchor who speaks in a French accent.”
• “Sometimes I would forget so I would just think of suh-ren-oh-mee for the word ‘ceremony.’”
• “Sorry, I don’t know how to turn my phone off … seriously.”
• “I have no excuses, only apologies.”
• “I will one day run with the bulls in Pamplona, except I won’t because I don’t want to run with the bulls in Pamplona.”
• “I don’t cook, but I do like watching good cooks cook.”
• “I’m fiscally prudent, I’ll give myself that.”
• “I am savvy, which is why I don’t have to do Revenge of the Nerds III.”
• “Nothing against doing Revenge of the Nerds III.”
• “I think those drapes are perfectly adequate for this room. They wouldn’t have been my first choice but then again they are pleasing to the eye and fully functional.”
• “When I met Albert Brooks I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
• “You can’t polish a turd … especially with chamois.”
• “It’s a swimsuit, but I just use it as a bra.”
• “Patton [Oswalt] has man-boobs, but he’ll admit that freely.”
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