To put a serious interpretation on a hilarious, fast-moving picture, Ratatouille is about education, aspiration, collaboration and the challenging of stereotypes. Moreover, he's a native of that 'Old Europe' so roundly condemned by Donald Rumsfeld, and a citizen of France, whose most significant contribution to America's fast-food cuisine was for a while redesignated as 'freedom fries'. The Disney company is popularly known in the film industry as 'the Mouse', so it must have seemed an amusingly subversive notion to make Remy, the hero of Ratatouille, not only a rat, but a highly sophisticated one. Mice, on the other hand, have always been thought cute and lovable, idealised by Beatrix Potter and providing the Disney Organisation with its corporate symbol.
Rats have rightly had a bad press throughout history, carrying plagues around the world, terrifying Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four and universally loathed, though the puppet Roland Rat enjoyed a vogue on television after saving a crisis-troubled TV station from extinction, and Sinatra and his disreputable chums proudly called themselves the Rat Pack. Each of its films to date has been a major popular and critical success, and its latest, Ratatouille, is arguably its finest yet, a tale exuding good taste and civilised values that centres on a rodent. In 1995, Pixar made its first full-length feature, Toy Story, released through Disney and now a sub-division of the Disney Organisation. Since the mid-1990s, this new Golden Age has come to be dominated by the Pixar Animation Studios, which had started out in 1979 as largely a computer hardware organisation. It began with Beauty and the Beast in 1991 and led to the creation in 2001 of a new Oscar, for best animated feature. S hortly before his death in 1966, Walt Disney looked at the rushes of The Jungle Book and said with a sigh: 'I don't know, fellas, I guess I'm getting a little old for animation.' In fact, he hadn't produced a cartoon of the first rank for more than 20 years, not since the great early quintet of Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and BambiĪnother 25 years were to pass before the Disney Studio embarked on a second cycle of great animated films in the age of the computer-generated image.
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