Ratatouille

Much has been written about the difficulties Disney's marketing executives have had in getting a handle on how to sell Brad Bird's Ratatouille, given its difficult title, adult story line, French setting, etc. But film critics are suggesting that the movie sells itself -- even while they themselves are doing their best to persuade moviegoers to see it. "You should probably just take my word that this one is unmissable," advises Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. In the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern asks, "Is the world ready for a movie that sees an upwardly mobile rodent in a kitchen as a cause for celebration, rather than extermination? Once you've met the clean little rat in question, and registered the high preposterousness of the premise -- not to mention the elegance of the execution -- the answer is yes." Bird and his fellow animators, writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, have "made Ratatouille so imaginative, good spirited and funny that it not only blurs the line between reality and fantasy, it manages to blur it between species as well." And between age groups, too, Michael Phillips suggests in the Chicago Tribune. "Ratatouille may be rated G, but its sense of humor is more sly, more sophisticated and more interesting than most PG-13 or R-rated comedies at the moment," he writes. Several critics seize about the metaphor of food to describe the movie. "It blends a savory stew of ingredients that, when whisked together, create a wondrously tasty and visually stunning dish," writes Claudia Puig in USA Today. Says Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun: "Ratatouille is a sublime dish of a movie, and the company's piece de resistance." And A.O. Scott in the New York Times has probably never written a more sterling review for a movie than this one for Ratatouille, which he calls "a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised."