Grade: C
Synopsis: A rat living in Paris, dreams of becoming a chef, despite his family’s disapproval and the fact that he’s, well… a rat.
Pixar has always been great about playing to the strengths of their medium, using animation to allow believable characters to do extraordinary things, and Ratatouille is no different.
For the most part.
Unfortunately the movie is a bit talky. There’s a lot of plot in the movie, which in turn requires a lot of exposition, which in addition to not being very funny, actually becomes tedious after a while.
Toy Story ran a brief 81 minutes. Toy Story 2 ran 92. A Bug’s Life ran 96. Ratatouille runs 110 minutes. When Pixar was starting out, they had to make every minute count, as the longer the movie, the more money it took to animate it. But Pixar is a hugely successful company now, and their movies are starting to show signs of bloat. Another script pass could have easily eliminated one of the plot lines and shaved 10 or 15 minutes off the run time, resulting in a much tighter film.
That doesn’t mean Ratatouille is awful. The animation is spectacular. Not hyper-realistic, but incredibly detailed, they’ve in-essence created Muppets. Indeed, the whole movie plays somewhat like a Muppet movie, minus the lame human co-stars.
Bottom Line: An enjoyable movie that could have been great with a tighter, funnier script.
