A rat’s tale

Hollywood — In the new Disney-Pixar animated feature Ratatouille, a lowly rat with an improbable gift for cooking up mouthwatering gourmet dishes rescues an unskilled Parisian kitchen worker at a five-star restaurant.

But the real hero of the movie is writer-director Brad Bird, who last helmed the Academy Award-winning The Incredibles and previously wrote and directed The Iron Giant.

In development for several years, Ratatouille lacked a critical ingredient — an acceptable script. So Pixar executives recruited Bird late in the game to step in and stir up some magic.

"Everyone loved the idea of the film and they loved the world and collection of character types," Bird says diplomatically. "But the story was not coming together the way they wanted it to."

Bird was given free reign to rewrite the story which, from the outset, was about a rat who aspired to become a top restaurant chef in the City of Light. Bird cut some characters, fleshed out others and added a few new ones — all under a looming release date.

"It was like laying tracks in front of a moving train," he says. "It was a race for me."

One of the characters he expanded was Linguini, the low man on the totem pole at a top Paris eatery. Relegated to removing the trash from the busy kitchen, the clumsy Linguini is on the verge of getting fired by his dictatorial boss. That is, until he meets Remy, a rat with big dreams and the extraordinary ability to concoct some of the finest dishes imaginable.

Because rats are verboten in kitchens, Remy must conceal himself while manipulating the hands of his new friend. Linguini had no dialogue in early drafts of the script, but that changed when Bird got onboard.

While Ratatouille is, at its core, the story of an unlikely friendship between a pair of misfits, it also is about the food: delicious, creamy, colorful French food.

To properly capture the flavor of the story, Bird jumped on a plane and headed to the European capital where he got a crash course on its world-famous cuisine.

"I had to go to a number of five-star restaurants, which sounds wonderful, but I approached eating there like an American would," he says, laughing.

"They brought out these little plates with food, and I ate everything on each plate. Then they brought out more plates with more food, and then even more. About halfway through this endless meal, I started to go, ’I’m going to die,’ so it was good that I started late because otherwise I would have died or weighed 400 pounds by the time I left."

In rewriting the script, Bird drew from his own experience as kind of an oddball with seemingly unattainable dreams. Growing up in the college town of Corvallis, Oregon, he was dissuaded by his junior high school counselor from pursuing his dream of becoming a film director.

"In my town it was considered a very weird thing" to want to make movies, he recalls.

But, having made his first animated film at age 11, he persevered. A few years later, he met Milt Kahl, one of the original Disney animators, who encouraged and mentored him.

For the Ratatouille cast, Bird enlisted an eclectic group of actors to voice the characters. He tapped acting legends such as Brian Dennehy, Sir Ian Holm and Peter O’Toole as well as stand-up comedians Janeane Garofalo, Brad Garrett, John Ratzen-berger and Patton Oswalt (who voices Remy the rat). For Linguini, Bird turned to Lou Romano, a Pixar animator who had just the right sound for the shy outcast.

Romano was as surprised as anyone at being asked to voice a main character in the movie because Hollywood studios usually want A-list actors to supply the voices. Romano’s only previous credits include the voices of minor characters in Cars and The Incredibles.

Romano says it was easy to empathize with his character. "I felt kind of similar to Linguini when I first came to Pixar," he says. "That was my first big job as a production designer and I felt a little bit like I was in a kind of sink-or-swim situation."

Oswalt, a comedian who starred as Spence Olchin on The King of Queens and has recorded CDs and comedy specials for HBO and Comedy Central, says he was very surprised to land the part of Remy.

"Apparently, Brad Bird heard my first CD and said, ’That’s the rat!’" he says, laughing. "I’m a big foodie, and I’m into chefs and good restaurants."

Like Romano, he could relate to his character’s being misunderstood and a bit of an outsider.

"[Remy’s] got to explain his passion to the outside world and go up against this restaurant critic and against the prejudices of these other cooks," he says. "I’m rooting for him."

After voicing the character of a rat, Oswalt says he has a greater appreciation of the universally detested creatures.

"They’re actually kind of cool," he says. "They’re pretty extraordinary. They travel all over the world — that’s why Remy doesn’t have an accent, because they’re constantly moving."

He observes that humans and rats are co-dependent in real life because rats eat the garbage that humans throw away and humans provide the necessary food source to sustain the rats.

"If all that collapsed, we’d both be gone," he deadpans, "so protect the rats." — Nielsen Entertainment News Wire


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A rat’s tale