Movie Review: Rataouille

I didn't see this film back when it first came out (2007 which was high school so this was probably during the period where I was a bit snobby about American cartoons, oh well) and suddenly thought of it the other day. 


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....

Movie Review: Up

Sorry about not posting yesterday, my mom and brother came up to celebrate my birthday (well, a day early since it's actually today) and between that and studying I just didn't have much free time. Actually, I usually post on my twitter if I'm not going to post (and I post all my updates there) so feel free to follow me, I don't post much outside of updates so I swear I won't spam anyone's twitter log.
So the movie I've got today is Pixar's Up which I never saw when it came out a few years ago. But I always heard a lot of good stuff about it and Netflix had it streaming so hey, why not?

Up

Summary: Carl always promised his wife Ellie that someday they would visit Paradise Falls, after falling in love with it after seeing the famous explorer Carl Muntz report on it as children, but they never got the chance before Ellie passed away. So, fed up with developers moving in around him and telling him to move out, Carl attaches a couple tons of balloons to his house to simply fly away instead. But traveling to South America isn't going to be that simple and the tag along Wilderness Explorer (Russel) is the least of his problems....

The Good: Lots of cute little details in this film (making fun of scouts, the dog's voices going strange, all the running gags) and I certainly cracked up more than once. I didn't notice any aimed-at-the-parents humor in this film (there probably were one or two that I just forgot) but it's a good movie for the kiddies. Nice change of setting and the whole premise of an older guy moving his house was pretty new (actually, you don't see that many older protagonists in kid's movies anyway)

The Bad: Geeze, that was the most stereotyped plot line I've seen in a movie in a loooong time. Enter the protagonist who is a good guy but currently not so happy, cue the plucky younger and/or female character who teaches the protagonist how life is worth living again (even though the protagonist has to give up their raison d'etre in the process) end of the movie. So the whole plot is my main complaint with the movie. Yes there were nice details within it but it was such a paint by the numbers deal that I just felt bored.


The Music: It's Disney so lots of orchestral music, a bit of jazz, and the period music at the beginning was a nice touch. As I've said before, music is something I notice more on a re-watch, not in the first viewing so I don't have much else to say about it. But I did really like the little bits of jazz sprinkled in the movie, never understood why I like jazz though.


The Visuals: After seeing Toy Story 3  I'm a little disappointed at the graphics here. There was nothing wrong with them per-say, but seeing something so cartoony after seeing how well Pixar can do humans now I just didn't like the CGI as much. It was pretty colorful though, just not my art style.

So, Wall-e is still my favorite recent Pixar film and with such a predictable plot I don't get why this movie go so much praise. Yes it did the predictable plot well but still, bleh, I just wanted to get more out of it. Hopefully when I see Tangled later this week that'll be more to my liking but not holding my breath over that.