Ratatouille Rat Scene
Young Vadlapatla
Ego, ready for the kill, clicks his pen and makes a note. He then raises a forkful of steaming vegetables to his mouth, taking a bite. The taste fires up his senses. His sunken eyes widen into a stare, and through those eyes, we step back in time. Suddenly, Ego is not a dour food critic but a boy of eight who has just grazed his knee riding his bike. The light is warm, and we see Ego sit down at the family table. His mother, looking to comfort him, passes a steaming bowl of ratatouille, which he dives into enthusiastically.
People love referring to this scene when discussing their favourite dishes, so it clearly captures something essential about food and our enjoyment of it. More importantly, however, it reveals something new about our antagonist. Until this point, Anton Ego has been portrayed as a soulless, unfeeling cynic. His cruelty implies that he is unable to love and that his life has been a quest to make everyone feel as miserable as him.
There are always inherent challenges in making sure that a creator-driven video is up to Pixar standard, but our production team as well as the talented creators worked together seamlessly to deliver amazing creative. Our lead producer took charge on collaborating with talent on shot lists, prop, and best practices for mobile-first 9x16 ratio, which made the production and edit process incredibly smooth.
In total across Pixar TikTok and Reels, this content amassed 15.7M views organically, and fan sentiment was positive across the board! Fans recognized the creativity of all the creators and were delighted in seeing these beloved Ratatouille scenes come to life.
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
Remy the rat is a gourmand and a great cook, but it isn't until he's washed into the sewers of Paris and ends up at a restaurant that he gets to test his talents. Linguini, a young chef wannabe, spills a soup one night and quickly tries to make it again. Remy, watching from the sidelines knows it's going to be terrible, so at a key moment, he rushes to the soup and saves it. Linguini's boss, Skinner, finds the kid has messed up his soup, but the soup accidentally gets served anyway to rave reviews. Remy and Linguini combine forces to remake the restaurant's slightly tarnished image.
Now everything up to Act 1 just described isn't bad, but the weakness occurs when the main character, Remy, cannot talk directly to the second main character, Linguini. The "realism" of not having the rat also speak English as well as cook, is minimal, which is why they movie probably would've been better served with a Seth McFarlane style "animals-can-talk-and-no-one-ever-points-that-out" setting.
The next revelation is that Linguini is actually the son and heir to the restaurant's previous owner, a legendary chef named Auguste, whom everyone, including Remy, admires. That bit of luck is a little too convenient and undermines the feeling of randomness. It just so happens that Linguini, heir to the chef throne, doesn't know how to cook AND doesn't know he's the heir AND got at job in the same restaurant AND found a rat that just happens to be an amazing cook. When creating your world, you can have some amazing things happen, but too many amazing things and they cease to be amazing.
Still, the movie is pretty entertaining. The final act hinges on a good review from a restaurant critic that once sank the restaurant's five star rating. Remy's ratatouille is a hit, but when Remy's rat friends are also found in the kitchen, the restaurant is forced to close down. Later, the characters reemerge at a new restaurant and all is well in the end. A bit formulaic, but where else are you going to go with a Pixar movie? Have everyone die?
Although the screenwriters make a decent attempt at trying to surprise with the end, shifting the action to another restaurant doesn't seem like much of a surprise. Surprises and revelations drive a story and while Ratatouille is an entertaining ride, it's through places you've seen before. It doesn't answer basic questions like why can a rat cook? Or how did Linguini not know he was the heir?
The "moral" of the story is based around Remy. Always pursue your dream and such. Just because you're different, blah, blah, blah. Again, not much of a surprise here. Remy overcoming his disapproving father is pretty standard. Good enough to carry the movie, but not detailed enough to wow you. The world of the rats was just a tad thin and could've used some more fleshing out.
The key moment in "Ratatouille" is not the creation of the title dish, a layered circle of sliced zucchini, eggplant, and tomato perfectly rendered by Pixar's animators and lovingly sauced by Remy, the film's protagonist. It's not the climactic scene of judgment by the film's primary antagonist, the food critic Anton Ego, voiced by a droll Peter O'Toole. It is, instead, the moment when the father rat, Django--voiced by Brian Dennehy--takes Remy to the surface to show him what humans do to rats. Remy looks up and sees a giant store window filled with rat traps and, more horrifically, his dead brethren strung up with cold, calculated indifference. Taken along with the scene where Remy, in a sewer, overhears a woman complaining about "filthy vermin" the movie becomes--at least for me--a powerful metaphor for the 20th century Jew's attempt at assimilation.
Like many a young Jew before me, I hated going to Hebrew school. I would beg my parents to let me skip it--I hated sitting in those dusty rooms with histrionic men and women extolling the importance of tzedaka (charity) which we collected for Israel in little blue and white tins that you may recall from Woody Allen's "Radio Days" (he spends his tzedaka money on a decoder ring.) Most vividly, I remember my Jewish elders loudly broadcasting our need to remember the Holocaust. "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it," one of them would write on the board. "Never again," others would chant and our obligation to remember the Holocaust--to "never forget--was drilled into us at a very early age. Anti-Semitism wasn't a concept, it was a fact. And anyone who ignored that fact was doomed to suffer.
Fear of the Christian world is a very real experience for many Jews the same way that fear of the human world is a very real experience for the rats in "Ratatouille." To me, that moment where Django shows Remy the shop window is the equivalent of Hebrew school teachers showing young Jews slides of concentration camps, reminding them that there's no safety anywhere, that the Jews are incredibly vulnerable. What Remy must overcome in the movie is not so much the challenge of the kitchen--using Linguini (his human friend) like a puppet, impressing the corrupt head chef--but, instead, the seemingly unreconcilable worlds of humans and rats. The movie chronicles Remy's attempt to assimilate.
Remy loves the human world. In one of the earliest scenes in the movie, he tries to convince his brother, Emile, that humans, while they have their faults, are pretty wonderful. "Look what they do with food," he cheers. He bemoans the fact that his fellow rats eat trash. "There's a reason they call it trash," he quips.
The rats eat trash in "Ratatouille" because they have to eat trash. Liken that to the historical position of the Jews in post-Christianized Europe where, because handling money was considered impure, they were forced to become bankers and money-lenders. Consequently, Jews developed a deadly reputation for being money-obsessed: a reputation that Hitler used to justify their "extermination." (Is it a coincidence that the scurrying rats in "Ratatouille" look a lot like those in Hitler's propaganda films? And, for that matter, why does Django have a hooked nose?) Remy's disgust at his family's trash-eating ways is almost Philip Rothian in how he resents the cultural fate he's been dealt. If humans think of rats as trash-eaters and rats continue to eat trash, there'll never be any escape. To quote Roth in Portnoy's Complaint (pg 76): "Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass--I happen also to be a human being!"
But Remy, unlike Roth, is not a human being. He's a rat. And the movie's way of dealing with that fact is, in my opinion, decidedly dark. At the end the rat world and the human world are not reconciled. Anton Ego knows Linguini's secret but keeps it to himself, choosing to benefit from the genius rat (eating at his restaurant every day) without giving him the glory he deserves. And Remy's fellow rats, while happily noshing on Remy's food, are doing so in what I took to be the restaurant's attic. The attic! Sure those rats look happy, but they're still in hiding. And hiding in an attic has undeniable resonance for 20th century Jews.
The story of "Ratatouille," then, is a story of exploitation. Django exploits Remy for his poison-sniffing abilities; Linguini exploits Remy for his arm-controlling kitchen skills; and, in the end, the world exploits Remy for his food, a set-up that he finds enjoyable but probably not ideal. He'll never reach the career heights of his mentor, Gusteau: he'll never write a bestselling cookbook (unless he ghost-writes it), he'll never star in his own cooking show. He'll never dine at other fine dining establishments to study the food; he'll never get to hang out with other chefs and shoptalk over a beer. He'll stay where he is and do what he does and he'll be grateful that he got as far as he did. Is that a happy ending? The audience seemed to think so. Everyone left the theater with smiles on their faces. But for Jews worldwide, many of whom hide out in kitchens of their own--doing their jobs and then returning home to their Jewish friends and families, barely interacting with the Christian world--it is a very revealing portrait. We're not entirely trapped, we're not entirely free. We walk the tightrope and try to forget the fear of our elders, a fear that makes it impossible to fully step forward.
c80f0f1006