Ratatouille

Few animation pictures manage to stick the landing quite like Ratatouille, Brad Bird’s 2007 release that still gets passed around by people who swear it’s underrated. You can tell a lot about a movie from its tagline, and “He’s dying to become a chef.” gives away the game in the best way.

At its core, the plot goes like this: In one of Paris’s finest restaurants, Remy, a determined young rat, dreams of becoming a renowned French chef. Torn between his family’s wishes and his true calling, Remy and his pal Linguini set in motion a hilarious chain of events that turns the City of Lights upside down. Patton Oswalt takes the lead role and runs with it, while Ian Holm, Lou Romano, Brian Dennehy make sure the margins of the story stay just as alive.

It would be easy to watch Ratatouille purely for its surface pleasures, but there’s more going on underneath. There’s a clear preoccupation with chef here, and it’s paired with confidence in a way that gives the whole thing more staying power than a plot summary suggests. You can also feel french restaurant and leaving one’s family working in the background, quietly shaping how later scenes land even when they’re not the explicit focus.

On paper, animation, comedy, family and fantasy covers the basics of what Ratatouille is doing. In practice, the film spends just as much time subverting those expectations as fulfilling them, which is a big part of why it’s held up.

Brad Bird’s handling of tone throughout Ratatouille deserves particular credit — it would be easy for a film juggling this many ideas to feel scattered, but the direction keeps everything pointed in the same direction. Look further down the cast list and you’ll find Lou Romano, Brian Dennehy, Peter Sohn, each handed at least one scene that earns its place in the finished film.

At 111 minutes, it never overstays its welcome, moving with a confidence that a lot of longer films could learn from. Behind the scenes, Pixar backed the production, giving Brad Bird the resources to fully realize the vision. Produced for roughly $150,000,000, Ratatouille eventually pulled in $623,726,000 at the global box office, well beyond what anyone expected going in.

Newcomers to Brad Bird’s filmography could do a lot worse than starting here; it’s an accessible, confident introduction to what makes the director’s work distinctive. Whatever else changes about how audiences watch movies, Ratatouille seems built to keep finding new viewers. It’s a detail easy to miss on a first viewing of Ratatouille, but it rewards anyone paying close attention. That kind of craftsmanship is easy to take for granted until you watch a lesser film try the same thing and fail. Little touches like that are why the film keeps finding new defenders long after its initial release. It’s the sort of small decision that separates a good animation film from a merely competent one. None of it feels accidental — Ratatouille is the product of choices made with real intention, and it plays that way from start to finish. That’s ultimately the difference between a film people watch once and one they keep coming back to, and Ratatouille lands closer to the latter.