In Pixar's new film "Ratatouille," director Brad Bird wastes little time in plunging beneath the surface of a schizoid symbiotic world of rats that thrive on the waste of a mankind they fear and despise. One young rodent dreamer named Remy (voiced by stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt) is sustained by more than just the compost and slops that the rest of his pack assaults with gusto. Remy has become enchanted by "Anyone Can Cook," a discarded cookbook penned by deceased chef Auguste Gusteau.
So much so, in fact, that Gusteau appears before Remy as a sort of ghostly Jiminy Cricket, exhorting the boy rodent to follow his heart's desire. Soon, Remy's dream is to be a five-star chef, and the way for him to follow it is via his nose. Even in a garbage pile, Remy uses an advanced sense of smell and natural born high-wire culinary intuition to combine ingredients that romance and challenge the palate.
But a chef's brilliance only shines for those who have the good taste to appreciate creativity, and Remy's father, Mustafa ( John Ratzenberger), and the rest of his pack don't value his evident genius. When Remy is unexpectedly separated from his friends and family, he winds up in Paris via sewer and makes his way to his phantom mentor's restaurant. Under the indifferent cooking and despotic rule of Gusteau's former pupil Skinner ( Ian Holm), a chef more interested in licensing TV dinners than wowing diners, the former five-star eatery has been demoted to just a single star.
When a bungling new member of Skinner's kitchen staff named Linguini ( Lou Romano) accidentally sabotages a vat of soup, Remy can't control his nascent professional pride. The chowder Remy creates on the fly, while risking the death sentence awaiting a rat found in a restaurant kitchen, is a sensation. Linguini, the human who can't even boil water, and Remy, the rat who always washes his paws before dashing off a perfect omelet, must become a team.
The physical solution to how a rat can best supervise a human in the kitchen while remaining undetected provides a rich well of digitally rendered physical comedy, and the results of Remy and Linguini's team effort put Gusteau's back on the fine-dining map. It also puts the restaurant back in the crosshairs of Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O'Toole), the food critic who torpedoed Gusteau's reputation.
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