Constant Viewer: Ratatouille

Nothing Constant Viewer says about Ratatouille will make any difference to you, Dear Reader, especially if you have children young enough that you look forward to any G Rated movie you think you might actually be able to suffer through, yourself. Rest assured, however, you won't suffer at all through Ratatouille -- you'll enjoy it as much as your kids will. If you don't have kids, go see it anyway.

We are living in a Golden Age of animation, a fact you'd never discover watching Cartoon Network or any of the current Saturday morning nonsense. The reason, quite simply, is Pixar, which has almost single-handedly raised the bar to where the best animated features today are as beautiful as classic Disney features, as funny as classic Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and as sophisticated as classic Max Fleischer cartoons. While Disney has had tremendous commercial success with such PC dreck as The Lion King and Pocahontas, only DreamWorks has given Pixar a serious run for its money in terms of quality, hence the House the Mouse Built serves chiefly as a distributor these days for Pixar's creative genius. With serious kudos to writer / director Brad Bird, Ratatouille is no exception. It's a gem.

Ratatouille tells the story of a rat named Remy (Patton Oswalt) who yearns to be a great cook forming a symbiotic relationship with a young man named Linguini (Lou Romano) in a famous Parisian restaurant fallen on hard times since its master chef died. Remy's family, suspicious of humans, the scheming new chef trying to capitalize on the restaurant's fading reputation and a deliciously malevolent food critic (wonderfully voiced by Peter O'Toole) provide all the required plot complications.

But the plot here is truly little more than a vehicle for a moving story about family loyalties, friendships, ambitions and dreams. It's accessible enough for small children and sophisticated enough for adults and it's carried all the while with great comic timing and a brilliant sense of how animation at its best works where a CGI effect in a live movie would look absurd.

Before the feature begins, Lifted, a new Pixar short adds to the fun. CV's only criticism is that, counting the previews and the short, Ratatouille runs a bit long for the attention span of pre-schoolers, several of whom were figgeting behind CV for most of the last hour. If Constant Viewer had his way, pre-schoolers wouldn't be taken to the movies at all; but he doesn't, so beware of your neighbors.

A few days ago, Constant Viewer wrote in a review of Live Free or Die Hard that if a better summer movie awaited us, it would be one hell of a summer. Of course, the two movies are apples and oranges; nonetheless, it's official: it's one hell of a summer at the movies.