Early Ratatouille review

(Source: www.aintitcool.com)

Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles says about contributor The Chemist "I wish I was this guy tonight" and I have to agree. For The Chemist got to see a very early preview of Pixar's latest project, Ratatouillle, along with director Brad Bird (The Incredibles) and Disney/Pixar creative head John Lasseter.

"Got handed an invite for a "free movie screening" today at my work today (sic)," writes The Chemist in his review, "advertising a "major studio animated film coming next year" to be shown at a local theater tonight. Luckily, a gal I work with also is the assistant manager at said theater and had told me it was a Disney flick, but even she didn't know what movie it was."

He later discovers that it's a rough cut of Ratatouille and that this is the second time the movie has shown in front of a test audience.

"The movie was in a very incomplete state," he writes, "with about a third of the movie being storyboards, a lot of gray-scale, then mostly incomplete animation. All the voice-work and sound effects were intact though. The few segments of nearly complete animation already looked fantastic. As far as the story goes, classic Pixar."

So what's it about?

"The main character is a rat named Remy who has a passion for good food unlike the rest of his trash-eating clan," writes The Chemist. "Remy finds himself paired up with a garbage boy named Linguini in a famous Paris restaurant. After accidentally creating a soup masterpiece, the duo hide the fact that the genius behind the cooking is Remy. Throughout the course of the movie, they battle the jealous head-chef and Paris's top food critic, all the while dealing with Remy's struggle of abandoning his family to pursue his dreams of fine cooking."

He continues: "Much of the action scenes were storyboards and gray-scale, but still promised to be dazzling when complete. The humor moments were hilarious and had the audience rolling. The voice acting was fantastic, with no recognizable A-list Hollywood stars to distract you from the characters, no singing in the edit that we saw either."

The Chemist says that Ratatouille "lasted a little over an hour and a half, and was greeted with resounding applause by the audience. When the lights came up I look in front of me to see John Lasseter reach over and shake Brad Bird's hand with a huge smile on his face."

He then finishes off with, "I cant(sic) wait to see the finished movie. Personally I liked it better than The Incredibles, the rough cut we saw tonight was right up there with Finding Nemo, my personal Pixar favorite."

High praise indeed, and sure to be music to Bird and Lasseter's ears. Lasseter and Pixar have been on the hot seat since last May, when Disney paid $7.6 billion for the animation studio. That was followed by a "disappointing" run at the box office for the Lasseter-directed Cars, which made only $244 million at the box office (keep in mind this total was disappointing by Disney's standards: every other animation executive would've gnawed off their own arm for that kind of money).

Then Ratatouille's original director, Jan Pinkava, was forced to leave the project, forcing Lasseter to bring Bird on board. After all this drama, it's good to see that this movie promises to be another Pixar classic.

So congrats to The Chemist and the rest of us will have to wait until Ratatouille hits theatres on June 29, 2007. You can check out the full review here.

Print Article

Email Article

View All Articles

How to subscribe to feeds