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kottke.org posts about Ratatouille

An Oral History of Raccacoonie

In the midst of the zaniness of Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the funniest things I have seen in a movie theater in years: Raccacoonie. (If you know, you know.) Inverse talked to a bunch of people involved with the film about how Raccacoonie came about and what the folks at Pixar thought about the riff on Ratatouille. First off, here’s the initial mention of Raccacoonie in the movie:

The initial idea came from stories that producer Jonathan Wang would tell about his father messing up the names of American movies:

I think it’s pretty common when you have parents who are speaking English as a second language: They butcher movie titles. [My dad] would call James Bond “double seven” instead of “double-O seven.” He would just mess up movie titles all the time. My favorite one he would say was “Outside Good People Shooting” โ€” that one is Good Will Hunting.

Costume designer Shirley Kurata added:

Being an Asian American and having parents where English isn’t their native language, I was used to hearing my parents mispronounce things. I had this memory when I was really young and I saw this word and I didn’t know what it said. I asked my mom. She was like, “Pin-oh-shee-oh.” I think both of us just laughed because we realized she totally mispronounced Pinocchio.

What did the folks at Pixar think? Of course, they loved it โ€” because it’s great.

I never even thought about whether or not we would get a call from Disney or if Pixar was going to be mad. We did a tour of the Pixar campus and got to hang out with [animator/director] Domee Shi, and she’s so great. We were like, “Have you guys talked about, uh… us ripping off Ratatouille?” Everyone loves it there, and it seemed like no one was really upset. That was the only thing we thought of: Are we going to get flagged for this? But lawyers cleared it; everyone cleared it.

It’s worth reading the whole thing โ€” I hadn’t realized they got Randy Newman to do a song for it.


Interview with Susan Bradley, who did some

Interview with Susan Bradley, who did some graphic design and designed a typeface for Pixar’s Ratatouille. I enjoyed her response when asked about “one thing everybody should do today”:

Something backwards or something analog you’d normally computerize.

You can find out more about Susan on her site. (via waxy)


Hilariously bad knockoffs of Pixar’s Ratatouille and

Hilariously bad knockoffs of Pixar’s Ratatouille and Cars called Ratatoing and The Little Cars. (via waxy)


Ratatouille is due out on DVD on

Ratatouille is due out on DVD on Nov 6. That was fast.


Short video feature on how Pixar rendered

Short video feature on how Pixar rendered all the food in Ratatouille. (thx, meg)


A Slate slideshow (with video) showing work

A Slate slideshow (with video) showing work from Brad Bird’s career, from his early tests to The Iron Giant to Ratatouille.


In the battle of Steve Jobs (CEO

In the battle of Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) vs. Steve Jobs (former CEO of Pixar and current Disney Board member), Steve Jobs (Apple) was the clear winner. Apple sold an estimated 500,000 iPhones this weekend โ€” grossing somewhere between $250 million and $300 million โ€” while Pixar’s Ratatouille grossed $47.2 million.

Update: Some more interesting iPhone statistics, including Apple’s stock price increase since the iPhone was announced ($32 billion increase in market cap) and that iPhone was mentioned in 1.25% of all blogs posts over the weekend. (thx, thor)

Update: Apple’s stock price went down this morning in heavy trading. I guess Wall Street wasn’t so over the moon for the iPhone?


Ratatouille opens today and it’s got a

Ratatouille opens today and it’s got a score of 94 on Metacritic, which puts it in a tie for 6th place on the all-time list.


Artist Lou Romano is on fire. He

Artist Lou Romano is on fire. He did the cover for the June 25th New Yorker and he’s the voice for Linguini, the main human character in Ratatouille. Visit Romano’s blog.


Patton Oswalt, who does of the voice

Patton Oswalt, who does of the voice of the main character in Ratatouille, shares some details to look for in the film. “Everything that Ian Holm, as the evil Skinner, does โ€” especially his teetering-on-the-edge-of-insanity rant to his lawyer about that ‘rat’ that no one else sees but him. The animators I talked to had so much fun rendering his lines โ€” ‘An animator’s dream’, according to one of the character design staff. Also, the animators used his toque like the shark’s fin in JAWS โ€” you always see it moving closer among the stoves in the kitchen. Hilarious.” (thx, martin)


A look at the available details of

A look at the available details of Pixar’s next few films. We know about Ratatouille and Wall-E but there’s details about Up, Toy Story 3, and Pixar’s first live-action film (???).


Ratatouille

With its latest film, Pixar manages to achieve something that few other big Hollywood films do these days: a convincing reality. The body language & emotions of the characters, the machinations of the kitchen, the sights and sounds of Paris, and the dice of the celery, Ratatouille gets it all right, down to the seemingly insignificant details. As we walked out of the movie, my wife, who has spent time cooking in restaurants (with Daniel Boulud, even), couldn’t stop talking about how well the movie captured the workings of the kitchen. To be sure, a G-rated kitchen but a true kitchen nonetheless.

I’m not quite sure how this is possible, but the people in Ratatouille acted more like real people than the actors in many recent live action movies (especially the rats), like they had realistic histories and motivations that governed their actions instead of feeling scripted and fake. The world of the movie felt as though it had existed before the opening credits and would continue after the curtain fell. Systems that have arisen through years, decades, centuries, millennia of careful evolution and interplay with one another were represented accurately and with care. In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander writes of the quality without a name:

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

Pixar’s search for this quality in the making of Ratatouille is impressive. And in a way, necessary. In order to draw the audience into the film and make them forget that they’re watching animated characters in an animated world, the filmmakers need to get everything right. Motions too exaggerated, motivations glossed over, plot too uncoordinated, and the whole thing loses its sense of authenticity. People need to act like people, omelettes need to sag off of spatulas like omelettes, and the only woman chef in a haute cuisine French kitchen needs to behave accordingly.

This is an interesting state of affairs. In comparison, the live action movies have become the cartoons. Not all of them, but certainly many Hollywood movies have. Spidey 3, Transformers (I’m guessing), Die Hard 4 (guessing again), anything Eddie Murphy has made since the mid-80s, Wild Hogs, Blades of Glory, RV, etc. etc. I could go on and on. So what are we to make of a cartoon that seems more real than most live action movies? How about we stop thinking of them as cartoons or kids movies or animated films and start considering them as just plain movies? I’d put Pixar’s five best films — Toy Story 2, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and let’s throw Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant in for good measure — among the best big budget films made in the last 10 years, no caveats required.

Oh, and I don’t want to give away the ending, but I will say that Ratatouille also has something to say about critics and criticism, a topic that’s currently under debate in foodie circles and has been discussed many times in different areas of the blogosphere. It almost seems as though the film’s message is aimed partially at bloggers, and for those that care to listen, that message is both encouraging and enlightening.


The Pixar media machine is getting cranked

The Pixar media machine is getting cranked up for the release of Ratatouille…here’s another article about the movie in Time. By the way, if you’re organizing any sort of advanced screening in NYC, the proper procedure is to notify me immediately.


For Pixar, the making of Ratatouille included

For Pixar, the making of Ratatouille included some time in real kitchens and restaurants, complete with a stop at the French Laundry for some face-time with Thomas Keller.


There’s no permalink, but if you go

There’s no permalink, but if you go to the Disney home page, they’re playing 9 minutes of Ratatouille, the new Pixar movie. There’s two clips…one takes place pretty close to the start of the movie and the other a bit later.

Update: For those of you outside of the US, here’s the YouTube version of the 9-minute Ratatouille clip.

Update: A more permanent and higher quality version is up on the Apple site.


Here’s the first full (and I believe,

Here’s the first full (and I believe, leaked) trailer for Ratatouille, Pixar’s newest film. It’s in English with Chinese subtitles.


Here’s the public’s first look at the

Here’s the public’s first look at the newest Pixar film (after Ratatouille): Wall-E. Looks like it’s about robots and is directed by the guy who did Finding Nemo, in my estimation the best Pixar film to date. (via waxy)


First trailer for Ratatouille, by Pixar and

First trailer for Ratatouille, by Pixar and Brad Bird (who did The Incredibles and The Iron Giant). ps. Cars opens today! Zoom!