03.01.08
Ratatouille
Ratatouille just beat out Persepolis for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars (boo) and then it showed up from Netflix yesterday! Since it beat such an awesome (if subtitled) movie and has been advertised as The Best Reviewed Movie Of The Year, I was hoping it would be pretty great. But it was pretty mediocre.
The oh-so-complicated plot involves a rat named Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) who wants to be a chef so he teams up with this kid named Alfredo Linguini (oh, great name.) who has a job in a kitchen but is completely inept at cooking. Together, they have to save the restaurant without letting people know that a rat is actually doing the cooking. I know, you’re totally in suspense right now, but I’m not going to spoil it for you!
Ok, I will.
The restaurant gets shut down by the health inspector but it’s OK because they open a new restaurant that magically doesn’t have to adhere to health codes and everyone lives H.E.A. Also, they convince a critic to stop being a jerk and Alfredo falls in love with Jeanine Garafalo who has a French accent. (The movie takes place in Paris, but most of the people & rats aren’t French for some reason).
So, it’s no Toy Story - in terms of story or voice talents - but it’s OK, not bad, great for kids probably.
But I had a couple of big problems with it. I realize that sometimes I really need to lighten up on the feminist stuff and maybe that should be especially applicable in the case of something like a cartoon about talking rats. But the way that women were portrayed (well, there was really only one woman) in Ratatouille really bugged me. Colette is a cook at the fancy restaurant when Remy and Alfredo show up. Towards the beginning, she even gives Alfredo a speech about how she has to be so tough and work so hard to compete in the male-dominated world of Haute Cuisine. Great, right?
Then, she falls in love with Alfredo. They go roller skating. When she finds out about Remy, she freaks out but eventually accepts it because the food is great. Then, she lets him tell her what to make. The little rat bosses her around and makes it look like she has no idea what she’s doing. And she is completely OK with it! She is mad at first because it’s a rat, but after her initial rant she is never mad about taking a back seat to Alfredo OR Remy. WTF? Why does she have to be made to look like she doesn’t know what she’s doing? Didn’t she have the ambition to be a chef at some point? Then, because she loves Alfredo, (also, WHY? She is a hot, purple-eyed, ambitious French chick and he is a total geek with no redeeming qualities!) she just gives up and happily resigns herself to help him out for the rest of her life instead moving up? This really really pissed me off. She is the only female character in the movie and she just serves the guys. Even when the guy is literally a RAT.
To me, this message is even worse than a princess movie where the girl just waits around to be rescued. This is promoting the idea - the very widely held and accepted idea - that if a girl falls in love she just gives up her ambitions because all she really ever needed to be happy was a man. You can dismiss the princess as a loser and an idiot, but Colette is depicted as strong, smart and talented - until this dude and his rat come along. Ugh!
Also, there is one black guy in the movie and the only thing they ever say about him is that he got fired from his last job for fooling around with someone’s daughter. Uh, stereotype much?
So, if you don’t have a huge chip on your shoulder about how movies portray women like I do, you will probably like Ratatouille a lot more than I did.