Column: It's time "Ratatouille" gets the respect it deserves
“Ratatouille” is the best Disney movie of all time and it’s time we start giving it the respect it deserves. You never hear people talk about it in the same regard they talk about movies like “Frozen” and “Encanto,” but I would argue it’s a better movie. There may not be song and dance, but there is so much more to this fun and heartwarming film!
Let me set the scene for you. Remy, a rat who lives with his large family in the ceiling of an old woman’s cottage, has an unusually precise sense of smell. His family uses his gift to sniff out poison, but Remy has other dreams. In the cottage he resides in, he discovers a cookbook by Chef Auguste Gusteau that declares anyone can cook. Thanks to the old lady’s television habits he also watches cooking shows by Gusteau, and he begins to see the chef as a figment of his imagination who becomes his guide. In the lady’s cottage, he has his first flavor discovery when he tries a piece of cheese with a strawberry. This scene is magical, and you can see the passion swirling around Remy. If you haven’t tried a charcuterie board, this scene will make you crave one. From then on, Remy knows he is meant to be a chef so he can put together more food flavors.
Remy’s dreams come to fruition when his family is discovered by the old lady as Remy and his brother try to properly cook a mushroom. They must run to escape to avoid being shot, and Remy ends up alone in Paris, the home of the late Gusteau’s restaurant. He watches through the window of the restaurant as new kitchen staff member, Alfredo Linguini, an inexperienced and, by all standards, terrible chef, tries to doctor up the soup simmering away on the stove. Remy knows he must do something, and he makes his way into the kitchen through an open window. After almost getting stuck in an oven and stepped on more than once, Remy fixes Linguini’s mistakes and a restaurant critic raves about the soup. While the rest of the kitchen staff believe Linguini has cooked up this incredibly tasty soup, Linguini knows that a rat has cooked the food.
Linguini ends up giving Remy a place to live, and they work as a team to keep making people think Linguini is the chef of the restaurant capable of excellence. The morning after their first night in Linguini’s apartment that overlooks the Eiffel Tower, Remy cooks them both omelets before they head into work together for the first time. This is the most adorable scene of the movie as Remy plates both a human-sized and rat-sized omelet for each of them. The food Remy cooks throughout the film looks extraordinary and will make you want to get into your kitchen to start cooking.
The movie has many twists and turns as Linguini and Remy work together to turn Gusteau’s back into the five-star restaurant it was in its glory days. While this movie doesn’t have a Princess or choreographed dance, which is likely why it isn’t hailed as one of the most popular Disney films, it has amazing food, characters you root for, and a plotline that will make you want to watch the film repeatedly. Heck, the film might even make you think differently about any rats you run into. Personally, I don’t think I’ll ever look at a rat the same way and I will always wonder if they’ve had their cheese and strawberry moment yet.
The animation in this film is top tier, which is what has come to be expected from Disney-Pixar films. While it is obviously a cartoon, that doesn’t stop them from making Paris seem like the most beautiful place on earth. Honestly, Paris is on my list of places to visit due to this film, and this film only.
If a film with the greatest animation, a beautiful setting, a cooking rat, and incredible food flavors isn’t considered the best Disney film of all time, we aren’t looking at it through the right lens. It is truly time “Ratatouille” starts getting the respect it deserves, and we need to spread the word about this heartwarming tale of a rat following his dreams.
“Ratatouille” is streaming on Disney Plus.
