Ratatouille director Brad Bird, “the best animation director alive right now” according to Ratatouille voice actor Patton Oswalt, says it’s very strange to watch his latest animation project with a real audience. “It’s disembodied,” explained Bird. “You tend to see the movie when you go over every inch of it so many times, you tend to see it as a collection of bits. The nice thing that happens is that you get pulled out of that. And because they’re seeing it for the first time, you kind of get to reconnect with that feeling and it’s very satisfying. It’s nerve-wracking because you’re hoping that they’re going to like it and go with it. But when they do it’s very satisfying.”
Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar’s latest excursion into the world of animation is set in Paris and follows the adventures of a rat named Remy who loves to cook. Remy’s got a nose any great chef would kill for and a desire to expand his universe and strike out on his own to follow his dreams.
Picking the Voice Cast: With the exception of just a couple of names, the voice cast of Ratatouille consists mainly of unfamiliar names. Commenting on that decision Bird said, “I think that it’s helpful to be at a company that has enough confidence to do that. I think oftentimes people who are not sure about their stories or their storytellers try to inject steroids of familiar celebrities, thinking that audiences go to these things to listen to people. I think that’s basically insane thinking. I don’t sit there and go, ‘You know what I’m looking for in animated film? It’s a familiar celebrity voice. That’s what I go to see in animation. In fact, you can turn the picture off. I just want to hear familiar celebrity voices.’
I don’t think anybody cares. The fact that our films are at least as successful as anyone else’s says that that’s not what people go to movies for. They want to be transported. Pixar’s standpoint, which is my standpoint as well, is that how you transport people in terms of the voices is that you pick the most appropriate one for the character. And that might be somebody famous like Tom Hanks, or Peter O’Toole in the instance of our film, or it might be somebody kind of well known. Patton Oswalt is becoming well known as a comedian, but people don’t think of him as a movie star. And it might be somebody that no one has ever heard of which is like Lou Romano, art director of The Incredibles who’s the voice of Linguini in this movie. I think all three of them turn in excellent performances and they’re all perfect for their roles. So I think that that’s what’s important to us is who is going to encourage us onto this journey in the best way.”
Making Food Look Yummy: “I wasn’t personally responsible for any of that," admitted Bird. "Fortunately, we have far smarter people here than me on that topic. There was quite a bit of effort expended to make the food look delicious. Because if one of the things your movie is about is gourmet food, then you can’t have it not look delicious. And computers aren’t really very interested in making things look delicious. They’re interested in things looking clean and things looking geometrically precise, and usually hard not squishy – not tactile. Computers are great for perfection. They’re not great at organic things. We had to work really hard to get the food to look like you could taste it and smell it and enjoy it.”
The French, Critics, and Rats: Bird said he never worried he might unintentionally insult the French with his film. “No, I wasn’t thinking that. I don’t walk on eggshells making movies. I think that some people were worried about that. I mean, some people were worried about having a main character who’s a critic. That wasn’t my idea but I thought, ‘If I’m going to do a story with a critic being a main character, then let’s do it. Let’s tell that story.’ I think that he seems like he’s going to be a one-dimensional character when you start that movie and he turns out not to be, which I think is interesting. I just think that you just go out there and you tell the story and you let the chips fall, you know?
I’m not walking on eggshells about France and I’m not walking on eggshells about having rats. A lot of people laugh at the idea and say, ‘Don’t you want to tone down the rattiness.’ ‘No, I tried to make them more rats.’ When I took over the film the tails had been shortened and they were all up on two legs and not doing any behavior that was recognizably rat-like, and I actually thought that was a huge mistake. Even though it was a lot of trouble to put people through, I had them re-engineer the rats so that they could go on all four legs. I encouraged the animators to study rat behavior because I felt like that’s what this story is about is a rat trying to cross over into the human world. And if we can make that a physical choice where we see a rat choose to be on two legs, and see him start to emulate human behavior, then that’s going make more empathy for that character.”
Was there a particular critic who inspired the character? “No. Jan [Pinkava], who came up with the idea of the critic was inspired by a particular critic in France,” answered Bird. “But it’s inspired by…it doesn’t look like him or sound like him or anything like that. But it’s kind of like E in The Incredibles. The weird thing is I went all over the world and everywhere I went everyone was convinced E was based on 27 different names. 27 different people, and they all had a character like that in their country. And they’d say, ‘Surely it must be…’ Because there’s a tiny powerful woman character with a pageboy haircut and big glasses. Much like that, I think that people will think that there is a specific critic.
But the idea of a critic whose opinion makes other people cower is not an unusual thing. It’s a powerful critic. The idea of the character is kind of somebody who’s gotten so far into their own power that they’ve lost their interest in the thing that originally led them to become a critic, and how do you then bring them back to that thing.”
