Ratatouille (2007)

Fantasy/Animation

Chris and Alex return for a brand new season of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, beginning with this special episode on Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), the eighth computer-animated film from Pixar Animation Studies and one of the studio’s cleverest in how it uses the metaphor of food and cookery to discuss ingenuity, artistry, and what it means to value creativity. Topics on the menu include the Europeanness of Ratatouille’s Parisian setting and how it departs from Pixar’s previous depictions of modern American; anthropomorphic subjectivity and the impact of new points of view on the accessibility of virtual space; the film’s symbolic rejection of Hollywood’s industrial shift to motion-capture through its comedic fantasies of control and the framing of cooking as an art; and how Brad Bird’s film incorporates both montages that “underdetermine” narrative acts and reflexive techniques that highlight Ratatouille’s own status as a computer-animated construction.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**