+2
I just saw it, it's the first movie this summer that I want to watch again right now, and possibly one of my favorite Pixar movies. I just wrote this review at another forum, which I'll paste here:
SPOILERS
What a great movie. Several times during it I thought Remy's voice sounded a little like (play write) Wallace Shawn's, but a bit deeper. Now I suspect that may have been an intended association when they casted voices, because at the end we find out that the whole thing is a story being told over dinner at a restaurant. Shawn's most famous film role is in My Dinner With Andre, a movie about a dinner conversation, and he was later in a film (Melinda & Melinda) framed as two different versions (one comic, one tragic) of a story told at a restaurant. Does this comparison sound like a stretch? Perhaps, but there's a joke at the end based on just this idea, where another dining rat says something like "it's a better story when I tell it."
So this has a self aware angle to it in the self-referential story about storytelling, and in referencing other such films (one of them - Andre - a touchstone of the 'genre'). The picture inside this frame stands up with Pixar's other movies on all the usual technical levels, and surpasses many of them as a story. Even the required moral (a critique of the insipid notion that everyone can grow up to do great things) is more sophisticated than most moralizing movies, whether compared with those aimed at kids or adults. Not everyone in the movie has the talent or vision to become great, in fact most everyone lacks either one or both. One of the two heroes is a completely average person, whose only talent (besides being a nice person) is as a proxy for the genius chef. The chef happens to be a skilled rat, and the guileless person happens to have a scalp that can override the conscious control of his limbs with a little tug -- an incredible coincidence, but one that makes for some amusing situations.
Some viewers might think that the rat-controls-human plot device is a bit out of left field but I found it completely appropriate. This is a movie about movie making and movie watching, and better yet, one that worries about what the trade offs are of appealing to a larger audience, about corruption of vision, and how to create something that is worth consuming.
The hidden rat is the director, or the creative mind, who literally animates everything. The kitchen is his crew and his studio (the villain is a typically greedy scam artist, whose energy is spent on selling mass-produced meals using the face of a known artist). And we're the diners.
You should be insulted if you sense hypocrisy in this "message" or how it's presented. I don't. Nothing about the movie appears cheap, careless or "mass produced." The aspects which recall other films (Melinda & Melinda, for example) are if anything improvements.
I would very much like to know what goes on inside Pixar's kitchen, and who (if any one person) is the genius behind this movie. I think everyone would benefit from knowing what they do differently from other corporate film makers. Their films have shown a consistency of quality that eludes Disney's other studios and Dream Works, and thankfully seems to have survived the hand-over from Steve Jobs to Disney.
Last edited by linespalsy; 07-15-07 at 02:46 AM.
Reason: Just polishing the paragraph structure and some phrasing.