Best Films of 2007 #9: Ratatouille

When I first heard the description for this film, I honestly couldn't understand its purpose. An animated film about a rat who cooks at a five-star French restaurant seems to reach out to no demographic in particular: children probably wouldn't appreciate either the obsessive detail over food or the French setting (remember that the French chef in The Little Mermaid is sort of a villain) and foodies would be turned off by the animation, by that long-circulating (mis)perception that animated film is (to paraphrase The Hudsucker Proxy) "you know, for kids!"

But then I saw the film, and it's probably better than anything in the distinguished track record set by Pixar to date. About a rat who emerges from the sewers to become a master chef in the highly competetive world of French cuisine, the film is the only great film from this past year that I can think of that actually looks into the filth and grime of our current climate and sees a genuine hope for how creativity can sometimes alter the rules of the game. Obsessed with issues of quality and the trenchant demands of taste culture as it is literalized in the food world, the film brazenly suggests that quality can emerge from anywhere, and that this in itself must necessarily alter how we perceive notions of "quality" and "taste" actually operate along classed and gendered lines. But it also does so pragmatically, and somewhat insidiously suggests that this affective power can only be drawn through a creative harnessing of nostalgia for a simpler time and place. In this sense, a happy little film in which a rat uses a human as a cooking puppet perfectly fits into a cinematic year obsessed with an attempt to retrieve a past that is no longer possible, if it ever was.