Rataouille
Summary: Remy has always had an unusual interest in food for a rat, he's practically a gourmet but the rest of the family is content to keep their heads down and eat garbage. It takes some some extraordinary circumstances but he does find a way to make his dream of becoming a famous chef come true, it just involves a few lies along the way.
The Good: I really liked a lot of the characters here and I liked them quite a bit more expected. When I saw Colette in the commercials I thought she would just be a rather tsundere love interest but then she had a great little speech about being the only female cook in the kitchens which I thought rang true with a lot of male-dominated careers. And then the food critic also had a great little speech in the end about reviewing that I also liked, heck even the "villain" of the story (erm, not the critic) starts off mostly reasonable, this was a pretty good movie for characters and the plot turned out to be a bit more complicated than I expected.
The Bad: The ending did seem to resolve itself a little too neatly and I didn't think that Linguini had enough character development as he should have (he's not the lead character or the main character, that role is unquestionably Remy's, but considering how important he is to the story and how prominent he is in all the advertising). Really though those are my only two real complaints with the story and they are hardly major ones, this was a pretty solid film all in all!
The Audio: While I liked the voice acting and the background music none of it was very memorable for me. The voice acting was a bit more memorable than the music and it certainly wasn't bad, this is just one of the times when I remember the visuals and the store more than the music.
The Visuals: Since this is a few years old it doesn't have the more photo-realistic look that Pixar is moving to but I rather like their more cartoony style as well. Everything looked polished, finished, and it never seemed like they were restrained by technological limitations. Sometimes I think it's rather silly that modern CGI cartoons are aspiring to look more and more like live action films so I'm rather happy to see cartoons that aren't afraid to look, well, cartoony.
So I'll happily give this film 4 out of 5 stars and will have to keep an eye out for it the next time I'm at the local used bookstore. Now I'm wondering if there were any other Disney/Pixar films I missed during that time period that are worth catching....
