Rewind Files: Ratatouille Belongs in the Pixar Pantheon

Rewind Files is when we take a second look at a piece of media to gain a better sense of its greatness, its awfulness, or its place in the cultural landscape. 

The only way a Pixar movie can fail is if it isn’t talked about. Most of them are, of course, and because of that we’ve generally reached a consensus opinion on just about all of them. Toy Story and its sequels are an all-time trilogy. Inside Out is the cult classic. The Incredibles and Up are the Smart and Original Picks for Your Favorite Animated Movie. Wall-E is the Critic’s Choice. Most Pixar movies roll out to great acclaim and dutifully take their place among the titans of animated movies, but one of them has been left outside, hopping up and down to catch a glimpse through the Animation Hall of Fame window. That’s Ratatouille.

Clicking back through the archives of the Internet, it’s baffling to consider why Ratatouille was shooed out of the cultural kitchen. This wasn’t a Cars 2 or even a Good Dinosaur situation: Ratatouille mopped its sauced-stained floor with critical success:

• Rotten Tomatoes: 96-percent; middle of the road for Pixar, but that usually equates to a hit anyway
• Metacritic Score: 96/100; this is a site that curates reviews from top critics and uses a formula to generate a single evaluative number from all their scores. How good is 96? It’s the tenth-highest Meta-score of all time across all movies. No other animated movie is higher.
• Won Best Animated Film at the Academy Awards (8 of the 16 eligible Pixar movies have done so, by the way)
• Scored 5 Academy Award nominations (second-most all-time for an animated movie, behind only Beauty and the Beast and Wall-E, which each had 6)

No slouch. Critics loved Ratatouille. Roger Ebert called it “a triumph of animation” (and gave it 4/4 stars). The Seattle Times said it was “perfect.” The New York Post went all-in, saying it was “arguably the finest toon in the Pixar canon … it’s hard to imagine anything in the foreseeable future will top Ratatouille for sheer artistry and inventiveness.” That’s ridiculous. It demands explanation: People were calling Ratatouille an instant classic when it came out, one of the greatest animated movies ever made—so why don’t we care about it?

A rewind of Ratatouille makes this case even more confounding, because Ratatouille is marvelous. The balance it achieves is delicate, beautiful, miraculous. Remy, our hero chef-rat, couldn’t be more charming and cheer-able. Anton Ego, the delightfully-named food critic, is one of the most complex antagonists Pixar has ever dreamed up. The animation is endearing. The laughs are genuine. The drama is rich. Ratatouille is, bar-none, everything critics promise it is. It’s a delight to watch, not in a pitch-out-the-popcorn “that was fun” way, but rather in a savory, imaginative, wish-there-was-more way.

Yet, the truth remains, this excellent movie never took hold. Ratatouille is the one we struggle to remember on trivia night and the one nobody can quote. This could be for a lot of reasons—to come up with a definitive answer would be to “solve the cultural zeitgeist,” which would be as dumb a mission as it sounds—but there are some proposals that make sense.

First, Ratatouille released in the sequel-heavy summer of 2007, a murderer’s row for original ideas trying to break through. We had Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Bourne Ultimatum, Rush Hour 3, Live Free or Die Hard, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ocean’s Thirteen and Evan Almighty. Plus, Transformers and The Simpsons Movie came out to cash in further on established properties. Remy and his tiny culinary mind had no chance.

Admirably, Ratatouille scraped together a tidy $200 million at the box office, good for 11th-best in 2007, but in the world of Pixar, that’s woefully below average. Of the 17 Pixar movies to hit theaters, Ratatouille only ranks 13th in domestic gross and had the 14th-best opening weekend. It was washed out.

Second, the one thing you wonder when you watch this movie is if it was targeted for adults or targeted for kids. It’s an easy argument to say it transcends both demographics, but maybe that’s the problem. Ratatouille is a movie about art and creativity. Its message—not everyone can be a great artist, but great art can come from anywhere—is a little bittersweet, and maybe as a result a little bit difficult to swallow. The easy kids’ stuff that Pixar usually banks on—merchandise, toys, huggable characters—don’t have the same look with Ratatouille. Would your parents bring you home a stuffed rat? In a summer of Spider-Man and Shrek, what little kid is gonna want to hang out in the kitchen with Remy? Do we chalk this whole thing up to bad luck and poor release timing? Was its at-a-glance questionable premise too big a hurdle for a rodent to leap?

Maybe so, but the beauty of Ratatouille is that it justifies its own risks. The movie’s dramatic climax, when Ego finally critiques Remy’s cooking, contains one of the finest monologues in a children’s movie. Ego, and Ratatouille as a whole, explain that when risks are taken by artists, it is the role of criticism to defend it and validate it, and thus in doing so take a risk of their own. Bold steps in art demand bold steps by those who consume it and evaluate it.

It would have been easy for this movie to lean on a more bankable premise or bring on more recognizable voice actors, but the fact that it does neither means that Ratatouille embodies its own thesis. Inspiring narrative and effective, memorable filmmaking can exist without commercial concessions. Ratatouille’s existence, and its excellence, is its own defense. So let it cook.