Ah, Pixar. Doesn’t that make you grin, just thinking about it?
(And OK, it caused my first miss-timing of the festival, as it was either delayed or much longer than I thought when I was buying the tickets, because it finished just as the McLaren Animation 2 screening started at the Filmhouse, 20 minutes walk away… So, not quite sure what I missed there – liking the simple line/pen drawing styles, but also the live action/stop-motion/flipbook relationship angst thing, which is unlike me – Also the retro-style nursing home action pic, which is far more my thing. But haven’t I seen that found footage/collage/toy car noir before? These, making the mixed media work…)
Anyway, Pixar – Ratatouille (Firefox’s US spell checker wants to substitute ‘Bouillabaisse’, which is interesting…): It feels a little predictable to say that it’s not as good as Pixar at it’s best, but it’s still miles better than anything else in the mainstream.
Case in point – I felt that the character design for the human characters didn’t have the snap that some of their stuff has had – it’s a problem that’s always plagued CG, even for Pixar, like Brad Bird’s previous film, The Incredibles. But compared to the blocky, un-differentiated characters in the Shrek films, they’ve far more personality. The rats themselves work better – they don’t have the ‘Wow’ factor Pixar sometimes achieve (we already know Pixar can do fur) – but there are some superb little touches. The switches from rat to human perspective are handled wonderfully – the rats’ voices transformed to the squeak of, well, rats – and they catch the skittering movement of rats perfectly.
Bird’s forte seems to be the heart-stopping action sequence – this, as with The Incredibles, has several break-neck sequences. Animation has the benefit of being capable of achieving a more fully immersive perspective than live-action – in the case of one sequence, literally. That sequence, early in the film, as our rat hero, Remy, is separated from his family and flung headlong through the sewers of Paris, has just that extra flair of image and sound design that lifts it up above the common.
But there’s no truly sublime moment in the film – either visually, like the seascapes in Finding Nemo, or verbally, like Toy Story‘s “You are a strange, sad little man…”, or – I could go on. (Bird’s first feature, The Iron Giant, is one of the few films I’ve had to stop, mid-DVD, because we were laughing so hard we had to catch our breath – that, from a simple visual joke executed perfectly…). And there’s a part of me that thinks Pixar will never surpass the short film Luxo, Jr., on which their logo is based… But then, it’s probably a little churlish to expect sublime from a kid’s movie (the kids loved it) – particularly when I’ll put up with much, much less from any other studio, whether animation or live-action.
It is great fun, and while the story is not groundbreaking, and some of the jokes are past their best-buy (I can’t believe I just wrote that), and the logic of having French characters speak with accents in the ‘Allo ‘Allo mold, while the French rats all sound American, is shaky – it has verve, and a sincerity that had me surreptitiously wiping away a tear. (Mind you, that could just have been me coming down from the pick ‘n’ mix sugar high. Besides, Die Hard makes me cry…)
Pixar always make me wish I had the patience to be an animator…