Ratatouille
I finally got around today to seeing the latest Brad Bird masterpiece, Ratatouille, and it was worth the wait; I loved it.
It’s amazing how a bunch of zeros and ones mashed together to create animated characters can be so moving; I laughed out loud a lot, and had a nice little cry at the poignant moment where the hard-hearted food critic, Anton Ego, voiced by Peter O’ Toole, is rocketed back his childhood by the taste of Remy’s gourmet ratatouille, and, in general, came to share in the high praise I’ve heard heaped on the film like ketchup over French fries in the school cafeteria.
I love this quote: “Not anyone can be a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” I don’t know where Brad Bird is from (well, I do, thanks to IMDB, Kalispell, Montana), but I’m strongly of the opinion that he is one. Certainly, he’s the Disney of our time, although I think only Dumbo is in the same league as Bird’s best—(Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and this one, IMHO).
I really appreciated how cartoony this cartoon was; for the first time in any computer-generated animation film I’ve seen, the human characters really seemed to work, and I think that was because the animators gave up on the verisimilitude. So, instead of clunky-looking humanoids who don’t really look human, we got hilarious-looking caricatures who, in their exaggerations, seemed more like the way people look to us emotionally.
There’s probably something to this as a general rule about art: the business of the artist is not to recreate reality; it is to represent it in a way that offers insight and perspective. I don’t go to films to see life exactly as it is; I go to see it in ways that sheds new light on it—or in this case, new seasonings.
Which I why, I suppose, as soon as we go home, Mimi wanted to make soup.
It’s amazing how a bunch of zeros and ones mashed together to create animated characters can be so moving; I laughed out loud a lot, and had a nice little cry at the poignant moment where the hard-hearted food critic, Anton Ego, voiced by Peter O’ Toole, is rocketed back his childhood by the taste of Remy’s gourmet ratatouille, and, in general, came to share in the high praise I’ve heard heaped on the film like ketchup over French fries in the school cafeteria.
I love this quote: “Not anyone can be a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” I don’t know where Brad Bird is from (well, I do, thanks to IMDB, Kalispell, Montana), but I’m strongly of the opinion that he is one. Certainly, he’s the Disney of our time, although I think only Dumbo is in the same league as Bird’s best—(Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and this one, IMHO).
I really appreciated how cartoony this cartoon was; for the first time in any computer-generated animation film I’ve seen, the human characters really seemed to work, and I think that was because the animators gave up on the verisimilitude. So, instead of clunky-looking humanoids who don’t really look human, we got hilarious-looking caricatures who, in their exaggerations, seemed more like the way people look to us emotionally.
There’s probably something to this as a general rule about art: the business of the artist is not to recreate reality; it is to represent it in a way that offers insight and perspective. I don’t go to films to see life exactly as it is; I go to see it in ways that sheds new light on it—or in this case, new seasonings.
Which I why, I suppose, as soon as we go home, Mimi wanted to make soup.
posted by Professor Dave at 9:10 PM
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