How Brad Bird became the Stanley Kubrick of Animation, a SlideShow from Slate Magazine
A Rat With a Whisk and a Dream
FOR someone who works in a restaurant, watching a rat try to become a chef might seem like just another day at work.
For movie audiences, a rat with culinary aspirations might be more appealing. Especially if it’s a rat that the chef Thomas Keller helped teach to cook.
The rat is Remy, the animated French star of “Ratatouille,” the summer offering from Pixar Animation Studios that opens June 29.
While earlier Pixar projects centered on child-friendly subjects like bugs and monsters, this one takes viewers deep into the world of French haute cuisine.
The story is a classic underdog tale that leans heavily on Cyrano de Bergerac. Remy, a food-obsessed rat with an exceptional sense of smell, dreams of becoming a chef. To get there, he teams up with Linguini, a clueless garbage boy at Gusteau’s, a once-great Parisian restaurant that has fallen into disarray since the death of its chef, Auguste Gusteau. Remy teaches the lowly kitchen worker to cook dishes that impress even the powerful food critic Anton Ego, who is given voice by the actor Peter O’Toole.
Although the story line has its charms, the precisely rendered detail of a professional kitchen will appeal to the food-obsessed.
The Pixar crew took cooking classes, ate at notable restaurants in Paris and worked alongside Mr. Keller at the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif.
“As a former actor and dancer, I have spent a lot of time in restaurants, but I had no idea of that vast difference between France and America, and especially the three-star restaurants in Paris,” said Brad Lewis, the producer.
The spectacle of French service was of particular note, and the film’s examination of how it can fade was influenced by studying La Tour d’Argent, a centuries-old Paris restaurant that lost two of its three Michelin stars. The cheese course in the film is copied directly from the one at the Parisian restaurant Hélène Darroze.
Gusteau’s is an amalgam of several restaurants in Paris, including Guy Savoy, Le Train Bleu and Taillevent. At a staff meeting at Taillevent, Mr. Lewis finally understood the intensity of high-level service.
“They had recorded that one woman took 10 minutes between her first sip of white Burgundy and her second,” he said. “So they concluded that the wine was too cold and were going to adjust accordingly.”
The intricacies of wine service in the movie are but one detail dedicated eaters will appreciate. The curve of the copper-bottomed sauce pans, the steam from a pot of soup or even the way slices of leek fall off a knife are expertly rendered.
The characters that inhabit Gusteau’s kitchen are drawn with precision, too. There is the gruff cook who might have killed a man. The only woman in the kitchen epitomizes stereotypical French rudeness. But she eventually warms to the garbage boy, taking time to explain that getting the freshest produce requires a bribe and that the only way to tell if a baguette is fresh is by cracking off a piece and listening to the sound of the crust.
No character understands what it is to be a great chef better than Remy, the rat, who is furious that Gusteau’s image is being used to sell frozen food on American TV.
When the late chef, who appears to Remy as a guiding spirit, suggests that anyone can cook, Remy’s response will be applauded by those who follow chefs the way others follow baseball players. “Well, yeah, anyone can,” the rat says. “That doesn’t mean anyone should.”
The team at Pixar, which is owned by Disney, worked with Mr. Keller and other chefs to create a menu for the restaurant. Michael Warch, manager of the film’s sets and layout department, also holds a culinary degree. He used the kitchens at the Pixar studios in the San Francisco Bay Area to recreate dishes for the animators to study.
Throughout the film, the characters work on dishes like steamed pike with butter, braised fennel and heirloom potatoes or grilled petit filet mignon with oxtail and baby onion ragout topped with truffled bordelaise and shaved Perigord truffle. The idea was to create food so authentic that people would leave the theater with an urge to cook and eat. But it turns out that computer-generated food can look much scarier than a computer-generated bug or car.
“We didn’t want something to look really photo-real,” said Sharon Calahan, the director of photography and lighting. “If it starts looking too real, it starts getting pretty disturbing.”
A scallop, for example, needs ridges and bumps to look realistic. But add too many and the shellfish becomes grotesque.
Bread, particularly the soft crumb inside, was difficult to create because it is so familiar.
So were green vegetables, for similar reasons. “Lettuce was really challenging,” Ms. Calahan said. The human eye is particularly sensitive to shades of green because there are so many variations in nature. Lettuce can easily appear too minty or a jarring lime green. “Your brain knows what color lettuce is,” she said.
In fact, the filmmakers said that almost all the food was a challenge, even the bits that were rotting in a compost heap.
“It was actually more difficult to make the food look realistically bad,” she said. “The trick was figuring which parts of the food to exaggerate.”
Mr. Keller, who has lent his name to a companion children’s cookbook for the film and is the voice of a restaurant patron, helped guide the culinary education of the Pixar team and subsequently became friends with Mr. Lewis, the producer.
The chef’s handiwork is most evident in the final dish, the one on which the entire plot hangs. The dish is the movie’s namesake, and needs to be so special it will impress the restaurant critic.
Mr. Keller cooked a fancy layered version of ratatouille called confit byaldi. “We had to think about what would make the food transformed,” Mr. Keller said. “What would transport him back to his childhood in a Proustian sort of way.”
With the Pixar team recording his every move, Mr. Keller had a last-minute inspiration as he took a palette knife to the vegetables. “When I picked up a layer of the byaldi and it compacted, I realized at that moment how the dish would come together.” The solution was fanning the vegetables out accordion-style.
Mr. Keller, who describes “Ratatouille” as “extraordinarily clever,” said he is impressed with the film’s dedication to kitchen detail. But he is more taken with its ultimate message: in a nutshell, don’t listen to anyone but yourself.
“It’s about somebody who is willing to take the risk, to take the gamble on doing something regardless of what the critic is going to say about it,” Mr. Keller said.
And he suggests people focus on the message, not the rodent.
“It’s not so much about a rat. It’s about ideals.”
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