Posted by Roxanne August 14, 2007 in Movies
A male rodent makes a better French chef than the female human who’s been slaving away at the restaurant for years.
148 Responses to “Ratatouille, in brief”
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Of course the rat is a better chef than the head chef who has been it at for 3 times as many years as the female chef, but hey
Yeah, I liked the way all the people who had been waiting patiently in line for years happily made way to the talented rat-controlled mop boy. That’s gonna happen.
Cute movie, though.
Naw, the head chef was a corrupt asshole who didn’t do much in the way of cooking during the film.
To be fair the movie suggests that the rat is the best cook in all of France, when he wins over the tough food critic.
Not only that, but I’m pretty sure the male rats spend the entire movie with no pants on.
I really enjoyed the movie. The rat was a good cook because he took risks, risks the other chefs wouldn’t take, including the woman.
Hey! The rat was also better than the black chef who’d busted his ass there! But would you have felt better had it been a female rat?
And Moby Dick was about a crazy guy chasing a big fish. You can mimimize anything you want, especially if it helps support the chip on your shoulder.
Come on, the movie was adorable. My sons and I just watched it tonight. You are reading much too much into this thing.
Gotta say that one didn’t occur to me either time I’ve seen it, and I’m a feminist from way back. It’s not only an adorable movie, but the animation is stupendous.
Might not be a stretch to say that it’s anti rote education, though. The passionate outsider beats the folks who work by the book–sounds a little too much like governing from your gut instincts, no? At least that’s more valid for cookery than war planning.
Well, at least it isn’t speciesist.
Roxanne, I’m with you. I’m an animation fan, and I really enjoyed Ratatouille, but really, other than the BS rule that All Protagonists Must Be Male, there’s NO reason that Remy couldn’t have been female (and I must say, if Remy had been female, that would have made for a better, more integrated story, as Linguini would have learned with Remy how to communicate/cooperate, thereby supporting the development of his relationship with Collette). In fact, did you notice that ALL the rats, thousands and thousands of them, were male? Had they mastered parthenogenesis, or what?
I thought it was clear that Remy had keener senses than most rats and all humans and that is why he could cook.
Interesting question - why no female rats?
Ratatouille was fun, but its anvilicious Randianism was nearly too much for me. The point of the film seems to be that there is a small number of Talented Great People who are randomly distributed throughout the population. It doesn’t matter who your parents are — it doesn’t even matter what species they are. But certain individuals are Geniuses, and others are not.
The Geniuses must be allowed to fulfill their Destiny and Vision. The rest of us? We exist to be their puppets (literally). In fact, even if you’re a highly trained, talented individual, say, on the kitchen staff at a great restaurant, if you’re not a Genius you can be adequately replaced with an army of rats.
My guess is that Pixar really wanted to call it Ratlass Shrugged but it didn’t focus-group well.
The Chief, why don’t you go back to your own little MRA blog and leave the nice feminists alone?
Oh, and “Crazy guy goes after big, white whale” would about sum up Moby Dick, in my oppinion, anyway.
I think you’ve misread the movie, Roxanne. It’s already been pointed out that the rat is not just better than the female chef, but better than all the chefs in France. It’s anti-human as much as anti-woman, on those grounds.
But what I think you’ve missed is that the female chef has a serious monologue where she excoriates her profession for the sexism that requires her to be twice as good as any male chef in order to even have a place in the kitchen. This isn’t presented as “Oh, what a crazy woman!” but rather as legitimate criticism. She is excluded from the kitchen because of who she is, just as the rat is excluded.
Maybe there’s something to this argument that I’m not seeing, but it seems to me that this criticism of Ratatouille ignores vast swaths of the movie. There’s much more fertile grounds for criticism in the boy’s relationship with the female chef–she puts up with more unsavory behavior than she deserves, even if he eventually wises up.
I’d just like my little girl to see a few blockbuster animated movies with girls as protagonists in which the main object of the movie is not romance. Girl movies = romances; boy movies = everything else.
There’s only so much cultural validation to be derived from “Spirited Away.”
Does the short brief contain errors, or are people just projecting their own assumptions onto the summary and onto the intent of the author?
Interesting.
You know, sometimes a banana is just a banana.
If you have Netflix, I recommend renting “Chef”– the lead is male, but his wife/manager is smarter than him financially, and there a female who gets promoted to sous chef because she’s really good.
Hey, where did the blockquote in my previous post go?
“Hey! The rat was also better than the black chef who’d busted his ass there! But would you have felt better had it been a female rat“
The part of the movie that bothered me was when the female chef is approached by the male ‘chef’ (the one controlled by the rat) and we are supposed to find it HUMOROUS that she reaches for the mace in her purse because he is acting so strangely. Yes, because being approached by weird guys in an alley is SO hilarious.
How do we know the rat was the best chef in France?
How do we know the rat was the best chef in France?
You mean other than the part where the most feared restaurant critic in all of France was won over by a single bite of ratatouille?
It’s in the title, fer chrissakes.
I gotta say, I come here to Pandagon every day and enjoy it very much, but I always keep in mind that the people who run the place are more than willing to jump on the man-hatin’ / caucasian-hatin’ / conservative-hatin’ wagon with only the smallest shred of evidence that may or may not actually be there (Duke Lacrosse, anyone?).
That said, I also understand that in the real world there often need to be people pushing farther in any one direction than they should be in order to get everyone else to get them to where they ought to be. Keep up the good work, everyone.
If people are genuinely interested in doing something about this other than whinging on the internet, the See Jane foundation is trying to make a dent in entertainment.
The Chief:
Whales aren’t fish, dipshit.
And if that’s really all you got out of Moby Dick, you didn’t read it closely enough.
Samantha:
If you mean Chef!, the BBC sitcom starring Lenny Henry, I wholeheartedly second the recommendation.
The rat was the only chef in that restaurant (other than the dead gy) with the opportunity to cook for the critic. And what the rat prepared touched him on a level deeper than the mere taste of the dish. It was “home cooking,” which is also interesting.
The point of the film seems to be that there is a small number of Talented Great People who are randomly distributed throughout the population. It doesn’t matter who your parents are — it doesn’t even matter what species they are. But certain individuals are Geniuses, and others are not.
So how are those piano lessons going? Have you rivaled Mozart yet, or at least David Helfgott? Can you at least play as well as the guy in Nordstrom?
After all, anyone can become a great pianist with practice. Anyone who tells you that there are Talented Great People who are randomly distributed throughout the population who are better piano players than you is lying to you.
Bullshit. We just went through this with the Jane Austen movie. If the puppet-chef had been female, then everyone would be bitching about how all female “success” has to be “owned” by men in modern fiction.
If the rat were female, then there would be some snide remark about how, of course, women are supposed to do all the cooking. I agree with the above posters who say “You are reading too much into this.”
I’m kind of with Petey. If Remy had been a female rat, there would have been complaints - maybe even from me - that, yes, of course the woman is doing the cooking, and the man can’t do anything in the kitchen without the woman tugging him around by the hair, and when all of the male chefs in France couldn’t win over the critic, the woman did it with her simple, heartfelt home cooking, while the man gets all the credit. I just thought it was a really sweet movie, and I didn’t notice the rat’s gender at all, while I loved the female chef’s monologue about sexism in her profession.
There could have - should have - been some female rats, though. I mean, there were about a billion rats on the screen at one point; they had to come from somewhere.
The rat was the only chef in that restaurant (other than the dead gy) with the opportunity to cook for the critic.
And your evidence that Gusteau’s restaurant was the only restaurant in all of France, and therefore the only one the critic ever ate at is … ?
As other people have pointed out above, the problem with Colette actually comes out of her own mouth, when she says that the chefs in the kitchen don’t create the recipes, they only make the recipes, and they follow them to the letter. That’s why she’s not a great chef.
You must really hate The Incredibles. And, probably, every other story ever told where the protagonist is the special one with the fantastic abilities, like Star Wars, or The Odyssey, or Spider-man, or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, or Happy Feet, or Die Hard, or anything about Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes, just sometimes, people write stories about fantastic heroes with abilities beyond the normal ken because that’s what they want to write a story about. People also write stories about ordinary people if that’s what they want to write a story about.
What’s the complaint, really? Protagonist is male? Yes, there are more male protagonists in movies than female ones. Could the story have been written better with a female protagonist? Possibly, but you weren’t writing it. It’s possible that the layers of politics caused by making Remy both a rat AND female would have made the task in front of him more Sisyphean than could be easily overcome within a story that is supposed to have an element of lightness to it. It is possible that splitting up the feminist argument into a sub-character was just easier from a narrative point of view. As a writer, I’d bet dollars to donuts that this is the reason Remy was a male. I put female protagonists in my stuff as much as possible because, as has been pointed out, some things are more interesting if there’s a woman doing them just because it’s a woman and this is a male-dominated world. It adds depth. But still, the last screenplay I wrote had a nearly all-male cast, because, frankly, it was mainly about three men. If it had been about three women, or two men and a woman, it would have been a different story. You can only go so far before the story you want to tell kicks the ass of whatever sensibilities you want to appease with your selection of characters.
Brad Bird hardly shies away from strong female characters - look at Elastigirl in The Incredibles, who went to rescue her husband and had an incredibly well developed partnership as equal head of a struggling family dynamic - but Pixar and Bird have, first and foremost, a keen eye for what makes a good story, and layering on all the politics in the world rarely works.
This, incidentally, is why comparing anything Pixar do to Ayn fucking Rand is a crock of horse shit. If Pixar were reading from Rand’s book, the stories would suck and half the film would be the writer’s personal politics delivered in achingly dull monologue. Rand is the perfect author if you hate stories and want everything the writer believes laid out in front of you so that you can analyse it philosophically. I, personally, prefer the more twisty and intriguing pathways of great storytelling and characterisation.
Since this is animation we’re talking about and not a documentary, I’m pretty sure the characters have all the talents and attributes the artists give them. Colette’s not adventurous because they don’t want her to be. The rat is “the best” because it works with the movie title. ETC.
It might have been a more interesting movie (for me, at least) if it were about an adventurous female chef who bucked the odds and became head chef at an M5 Paris restaurant. I know it’s very hard to imagine a situation like that if you work at Pixar in Emeryville and you can eat at Alice Water’s place anytime you like …
Mnemosyne,
I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at (that was snark, right?)…I’m not arguing that most people are geniuses — what bothers me about the film is the role assigned to the 99% of the population that aren’t geniuses: that of mindless servants doing the bidding of their intrinsically-superior masters (the image of Remy as Linguini’s puppet-master is so literal, and funny, that it’s easy to overlook what’s really going on).
Remember the NYT article (full article is hidden behind Times Select) in which multi-billionaire CEO’s justify their outrageous wealth in ethical terms? I remember one of them saying something like, “In any organization, there are one or two people who really make a difference,” and then asserting that he’s one of them, and thus deserving of his billions.
Ratatouille, I think, absolutely buys into that ideology.
You know, I married (twice) a fully professionally trained chef who happens to be female, and I gotta inject a note of reality into this: She would have been better off a male rat than a human dyke in terms of the access to other people’s money her Great Gift buys her.
And the restaurant biz is all about rich people who can eat choosing which talented trained chefs will get the chance to be famous. The rat using the man as his puppet differed from the woman in the kitchen in one vital respect: he had nothing to lose by expressing his talent.
So yeah, sorry to burst bubbles, but Roxanne had it in one.
We love the movie, have taken the kid to it twice, but it’s realistic in that regard. Not in the aspect of showing a Hobart full of rats, but in showing the real sexism of food culture.
It might have been a more interesting movie (for me, at least) if it were about an adventurous female chef who bucked the odds and became head chef at an M5 Paris restaurant. I know it’s very hard to imagine a situation like that if you work at Pixar in Emeryville and you can eat at Alice Water’s place anytime you like …
It would have been awfully boring animation. “Oh, look. A bunch of humans running around doing exactly what humans do … but they’re animated!”
I’m guessing that you think Dumbo should have been about the plight of mistreated elephants in the circus and not about a flying elephant. I mean, how stupid is it to write fantasy
If you think that a movie about a female chef should be written, go buy yourself a copy of Syd Field and write it. You’ll never sell it as animation, but I’m sure some indie producer would be interested in it as live action.
It might have been a more interesting movie (for me, at least) if it were about an adventurous female chef who bucked the odds and became head chef at an M5 Paris restaurant.
That’s called science fiction, because it can’t happen in our current reality. But yeah, I’d also pay $20 plus popcorn to see that movie…
It’s true. Mulan, Pocahantas, Snow White and Cinderella were all about the animals.
I’m not arguing that most people are geniuses — what bothers me about the film is the role assigned to the 99% of the population that aren’t geniuses: that of mindless servants doing the bidding of their intrinsically-superior masters (the image of Remy as Linguini’s puppet-master is so literal, and funny, that it’s easy to overlook what’s really going on).
Of course, at the end, Linguini is released from his servitude to do what he’s really good at — being a waiter. You know, the same way that Remy is freed from having to have a “beard” who cooks for him. Unless you think that being a waiter is automatically a horrible, degrading job that no one should have to do since you’re a “mindless servant doing the bidding of your intrinsically-superior master,” I’m not sure I get your point.
RemyLinguini is freed by inheriting the restaurant. But I also don’t buy totally into the Rand thing. What was the title of the cookbook? Anyone Can Cook!It’s true. Mulan, Pocahantas, Snow White and Cinderella were all about the animals.
Maybe try some Disney movies that didn’t have intelligent animals helping humans? Because all of the above have exactly that. Or do you not remember Gus and Jacques and the rest of the animals sewing Cinderella’s dress for the ball? Or the forest animals helping the Dwarfs build Snow White’s bed? The only difference with “Ratatouille” is that the animals get to speak to one another, even if the humans don’t understand what they say.
Sorry to leave in the middle of the argument, but G. is dragging me out for a healthy walk. I’ll be back.
Pesto- I had exactly the same reaction to The Incredibles-Brad Bird’s previous attempt to make Atlas Shrugged for tykes.
My girlfriend and I both had that complaint while leaving, although we did still love the movie on the whole.
While the number of female characters would still be low, there was an easy fix available for the Remy consistently having better judgment than Collette. Remy’s ability related to smell and taste. I think it’s reasonable to just accept movie logic and say he can beat any human on that score. Collette could have simply once gotten a recipe better because she understood texture. (Collette wasn’t set up as having a superior understanding of texture, but presumably that’s an area where a rat wouldn’t have much experience.)
This is technically OT, but Mrs. F and I saw Stardust the other day, and while we enjoyed the film as and immediately after we watched it, the more we thought about it, the more we started to dislike it.
The story is about a star who falls to earth (as a means of establishing dynastic succession among sons) and incarnates as a lovely young woman. An adventurous lad, wanting to impress his girlfriend, sets off on a quest to retrieve the star. He doesn’t know at that time that the star is now a woman, but when he finds that this is the case, his first move is to bind her with a magic chain and lead her halfway across the country — while she’s limping. Later, of course, they fall in love.
Did anyone see this and what did you think?
Roxanne,
Yes, “Anyone Can Cook” — which clearly includes rats and people with no control over their own limbs, as long as a Genius is controlling them. Remember, Linguini absolutely cannot cook on his own (don’t forget what he does to the soup as a plongeur). The critic, whose name escapes me at the moment — wait, is it Scar? — parses the phrase in his long “Critics are sniveling parasites, except when they help people recognize Geniuses” voice-over, when he explains that, while not everyone can cook, a great cook can come from anywhere, and the Greatest Cook in France comes from such humble origins that this reviewer etc. etc. etc.
Mnemosyne,
The Randianism fits in well with Brad Bird’s last big hit, The Incredibles, which, as pablo mentions above, was about how society holds back the Truly Great by not letting them be their true, superior selves.
Unless you think that being a waiter is automatically a horrible, degrading job that no one should have to do since you’re a “mindless servant doing the bidding of your intrinsically-superior master,” I’m not sure I get your point.
Alright, I’m calling strawman. I might point out that Remy’s talent as a waiter/skater is completely unjustified in the film — until he starts his Brian Boitano impersonation (sorry, I can’t come up with the names of any great roller skaters), he’s played over and over again as a klutz. His ability as a waiter is driven by the needs of the plot (all the small-minded kitchen staff need to leave in a huff at Remy’s unveiling, and someone needs to serve in the dining room) and of the movie’s physical comedy, not out of anything from within the character himself.
I think waiting demands tremendous talent and hard work. I think being a comis, or a sous chef, or a maitre d’hotel also demands talent. But I think the movie itself, and also Brad Bird, think that quality depends on (a) a Single Great Genius, who is just naturally better than nearly anyone else, telling everyone exactly what to do, and (b) everyone else just doing whatever the Genius says. Individualism is great for the Geniuses — everyone else exists merely to do as they’re told. In terms of the quality of food, it evidently doesn’t even matter if the food is actually cooked by trained, dedicated professionals like the human kitchen staff — they’re all worth exactly the same as a bunch of rats who can’t even tell food from garbage. All that matters is the Genius directing them.
My point is, I think that’s a ridiculous, reactionary, anti-democratic version of reality. And that the only people who really buy into it are members of the ruling class trying to justify their enormous power and wealth to themselves and their employees, and your local Objectivist Society.
Sorry to lower the intellectual tone of the conversation, but did anybody else have trouble getting over the shudder factor of watching rats flow over a kitchen?
Okay, I’m back.
Pesto, first of all, REMY IS THE RAT’S NAME. The human’s name is Linguini.
The Randianism fits in well with Brad Bird’s last big hit, “The Incredibles,” which, as pablo mentions above, was about how society holds back the Truly Great by not letting them be their true, superior selves.
Uh-huh.
What was the name of the island that Bob went to?
You could read The Incredibles as an attack on mediocrities purporting to restrain their betters. An equally valid interpretation would be seeing it as an attack on those who want to stand forth and make society better.
… and make society better.
After all, it is arguable that Syndrome only became Syndrome because he wasn’t permitted to be on the good guy side, which speaks against the snobbishness of the gifted elite of Supers, which speaks against a Randian take on the film.
Mnemosyne,
Yes, you caught me one time typing “Remy” instead of “Linguini”. I blame the little rat sitting on my head controlling my hands as I type.
If you want the full run-down on Brad Bird and Rand, just google “Brad Bird” + “Rand”. You’ll find Randians extolling his virtues, normal people analyzing Bird’s politics, and even this review of Ratatouille by someone named Julian Sanchez that makes the same connection between the film and Rand as I do (I haven’t read this particular review until this exchange, and I swear I came up with Ratlass Shrugged all by myself — maybe I’m a Genius after all…)
Yes, you caught me one time typing “Remy” instead of “Linguini”. I blame the little rat sitting on my head controlling my hands as I type.
Actually, you did it three times. Hence the all caps.
And, yes, I am aware that some libertarians are convinced that The Incredibles is a Randian screed about how supermen should rule us all. I heard all of the arguments when the movie first came out. If you want to buy that argument, then Spiderman and Batman are also Randian screeds about Our Superiors. Not to mention Superman, the ultimate Randian hero. Therefore, Sam Raimi and Bryan Singer are Randians just like Brad Bird, right? After all, they also make films about superheroes who are forced to suppress their powers by their inferiors.
You didn’t answer my question: what was the name of the island that Bob went to? It’s very important to the themes of the film. Brad Bird even makes a point of discussing it in the commentary to the film.
Sorry to lower the intellectual tone of the conversation, but did anybody else have trouble getting over the shudder factor of watching rats flow over a kitchen?
At least they had to go through the dishwasher …
But, yeah, it was pretty unnerving to have the army of rats swarming the kitchen. At least they acknowledged what would really happen and had the restaurant shut down.
Rats that have been inhabiting the Paris sewers, no less.
Sorry to lower the intellectual tone of the conversation, but did anybody else have trouble getting over the shudder factor of watching rats flow over a kitchen?
Yes, but mostly because I was worried that they would get hurt. I have pet rats, and they are not allowed near the stove when something is cooking.
The Incredibles may oppose creeping mediocrity in a somewhat smug way, but that doesn’t make it Randian. The heroes of the movie are unselfconsciously committed to sacrificing for the public good, and not just when they’re in their spandex — Mr. Incredible goes out of his way to assist policyholders at his insurance gig, and it costs him his job.
I’ve seen negative Objectivist reviews of The Incredibles that emphasized just that issue. Many Randians have big problems with the movie, and they should.
Without getting into the ideological battle lines being drawn here, let me suggest to Linden at # 17 that Miyazaki films in general are really good for their female protagonists: Kiki’s Delivery Service and especially My Neighbor Totoro are great for young kids, and as they get older they can watch Castle In The Sky and (eventually) Princess Mononoke.
Mnemosyne,
I still only count one time when I wrote “Remy” and meant “Linguini”. Comment #14 — no names. Comment #36: “Remy as Linguini’s puppet-master” — got that right. Comment #47 “Linguini absolutely cannot cook on his own (remember what he does to the soup as a plongeur)” — also right. “Remy’s talent as a waiter/skater”: blew that. That’s one “Remy’s unveiling” — refers to the rat being revealed, got that right. But whatever. Why are we arguing over that again?
You didn’t answer my question: what was the name of the island that Bob went to? It’s very important to the themes of the film. Brad Bird even makes a point of discussing it in the commentary to the film.
I don’t remember. I saw the film with my kids when it came out. I only mentioned The Incredibles in passing. Why don’t you explain your point — if you want to discuss The Incredibles — instead of quizzing me about the movie?
I’m kind of with Petey. If Remy had been a female rat, there would have been complaints - maybe even from me - that, yes, of course the woman is doing the cooking, and the man can’t do anything in the kitchen without the woman tugging him around by the hair, and when all of the male chefs in France couldn’t win over the critic, the woman did it with her simple, heartfelt home cooking, while the man gets all the credit.
On the other hand, it would have brought the major female character count up to two. That would have counted for a lot, and if the female Remy had still had the male Remy’s innocent, enthusiastic, and nerdy passion for cooking, it would have portrayed an under-represented trait in female characters.
Would I still have complained? Hell yeah! I am always critical of the things I love!
I agree that part of the reason Remy was a better cook than Colette was because he had nothing to lose. Colette, as she explained, had to work twice as hard as anyone else in the kitchen, and probably focused on memorizing the rule book (cook book?) because that was the only way she could get ahead–any attempts at individuality would have been squelched because everyone was looking for any excuse to get rid of her.
I don’t know that this particular movie would have been better with a female protagonist, but we do definitely need more movies with female protagonists. This is a hard complaint to make because, no, I’m not suggesting Buzz & Woody should have been girls–I don’t think we need fewer movies with male protagonists, exactly, just a more equal ratio. And, for the love of the disco ball, yes, it would be nice–and this was my one slight complaint with Ratatouille (which I didn’t have with The Incredibles, incidentally, because The Incredibles didn’t have this problem)–to have relatively equal gender ratios within movies, too.
I used to love people like you when I was a divorce lawyer. Such attitudes were a blissful guarantee of files and income from couples who otherwise wouldn’t have needed or wanted to be apart.I only mentioned “The Incredibles” in passing. Why don’t you explain your point — if you want to discuss “The Incredibles” — instead of quizzing me about the movie?
Actually, I wanted to discuss “Ratatouille,” but you seem convinced that Brad Bird is a Randian in disguise, so I guess we have to debunk that first.
The island is Nomanisan Island. As in, “No man is an island.” Because the entire movie is about how Bob can’t do everything on his own and needs to learn to rely on the help of the people around him. He created Syndrome by rejecting him as a partner, so his stubborn insistence on doing things by himself literally comes back to haunt him.
Now, I’m not very familiar with Rand, but I seem to recall that she didn’t have many teamwork themes in her books or her philosophy. I don’t recall her talking about how The Supermen would need to work together to accomplish their goals. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
Yes, there are Randians who are convinced the film is one big libertarian valentine. Those people are idiots who paid attention to nothing other than the fact that there are superheroes in the movie, and superheroes are, like, totally what Ayn Rand was talking about, man!
Since the whole meme was pretty popular, I do think that Bird was playing around with it in “Ratatouille.” Again, though, you seem to have missed the whole part where Remy using Linguini as a front is a failure. It makes both of them unhappy and it can’t be sustained for the long term.
I used to love people like you when I was a divorce lawyer. Such attitudes were a blissful guarantee of files and income from couples who otherwise wouldn’t have needed or wanted to be apart.
Notice that I said “things” and not “people”. There a difference between the way one approaches relationships with people and the way one approaches movies and other forms of media. You can say whatever you want about a movie and it won’t get its feelings hurt or decide it doesn’t want you to watch it anymore.
The island’s name is Nomanisan, and you’re damn right that it’s significant. At the end of the day, the movie suggests that while some people are extraordinary at certain very specific things (their “superpower”), it’s only in tandem with each other, with ordinary joes and janes, and with their own basic human decency (the scenes with Mirage are especially telling here, as is the scene where Dash tries to come in second), that anyone can produce an extraordinary result.
Mnemosyne,
Thanks for elaborating on your Incredibles analysis. Your reading of the island certainly cuts against the “if everyone is special, no one is” theme in the first part of the film, and the I’s’ unhappiness by their legally-enforced normality. FWIW, I was a lot less irritated by that film than by Ratatouille, though, paradoxically, I also found it less entertaining.
Now, as to whether the Remy-under-the-tocque (sp?) arrangement is a failure…well, they do manage to cook the sweetbreads successfully, which is a pretty important moment for them. And they do manage to launch the Linguini/Colette romance. Of course, part of the failure is due to the constraints the arrangement places on Remy, and the fact that Linguini starts to think that he’s better than he really is and argues with his Little Chef. The problem then, is that Remy can’t really run things when his Genius isn’t acknowledged, and Linguini can’t really follow him when everyone treats him as the genius.
So you’re right, neither of them is “being himself” until Remy is revealed as the real chef. Everyone is happier being honest in the end. If the restaurant had triumphed as a result of Remy encouraging Colette and the other staff to use their own creativity the way he had used his, to stop mechanically reproducing recipes just because someone wrote them that way, to trust their talents and taste as he had, then the film would have demonstrated different dynamics of creativity. But as it is, you evidently either have it (and can see all the colors and hear the symphony when you taste food) or you don’t (and can’t tell food from garbage). Even if you can taste it, you can’t necessarily create it yourself. And success in the restaurant relies on only one Genius to trust his instincts and taste — everyone else, who for some inexplicable reason aren’t geniuses, can contribute only to the extent that they serve the Genius’s vision.
I still maintain that this is a reactionary vision of a society with Leaders and Followers that functions only when everyone knows their place. Leaders need to lead. Followers are happier being led and not making decisions. I think the film could have moved in another direction at a number of points, but it is what it is and what it is is something that irritates me a lot.
I’m sorry to comment and run, but it’s 1 a.m. where I am and I need to get up and go to work tomorrow (where I can lurk here, but I really can’t post). But I can come back to this thread tomorrow to continue our part of the discussion tomorrow if you’d like.
Even though Remy is pretty androgynous–or at least doesn’t carry much stereotypical masculinity into the plot–I’m not sold on the idea that such a gender change wouldn’t mean a radically different movie. As Petey points out, the movie becomes more objectionable if we keep everything the same but change either Remy or Linguini’s gender. If you leave things as they are, those objectionable aspects change the movie significantly. Addressing them adequately also changes the movie significantly.
That’s not necessarily a problem–it would be great to see a movie that addresses those issues–but that would be a different movie. Complaining over the non-existence of that different movie makes sense, but, while that’s a more than fair complaint against the industry, market, etc., I don’t see how it’s a legitimate criticism of this particular movie. We might as well complain that Ratatouille isn’t a good film because it isn’t about organic food or vegetarianism.
Give it another shot. It may just be that you don’t like the movie, or even the genre. But don’t confuse “I wanted to see another movie” with “The movie I saw is bad.”
I’m sorry to comment and run, but it’s 1 a.m. where I am and I need to get up and go to work tomorrow (where I can lurk here, but I really can’t post).
That’s why it’s nice to be on the West Coast — I can usually get in the last word when all of you Easterners go to bed.
If the restaurant had triumphed as a result of Remy encouraging Colette and the other staff to use their own creativity the way he had used his, to stop mechanically reproducing recipes just because someone wrote them that way, to trust their talents and taste as he had, then the film would have demonstrated different dynamics of creativity. But as it is, you evidently either have it (and can see all the colors and hear the symphony when you taste food) or you don’t (and can’t tell food from garbage).
Which is why I brought up muscial talent earlier. In this film, like it or not, cooking ability is shown as a talent, not a craft. Anyone can cook … but not everyone can be a great chef.
As I said earlier, not everyone has the same talents. I know you don’t like to hear it, but that’s kinda what life is like. Some things you can practice and get better at, but some things you can’t. I might want to become a professional animator, but I can’t draw and, more importantly, I can’t caricature. So an animator could encourage me all day long to draw at a professional level, s/he could spend years tutoring me, but I wouldn’t be able to do it, because I do not have that talent. I could become better at drawing, but I wouldn’t be an artist.
Does this set up a hierarchial world when some people have inborn talents and others don’t? Well, yes. But it’s better than the alternative.
I still maintain that this is a reactionary vision of a society with Leaders and Followers that functions only when everyone knows their place.
Actually, it sets up a world of Artists and Consumers. The Artist produces his/her art and gives it to the Consumers, hoping they will like it. That’s one of the reasons for the scene between Remy and Emile where he tries to teach Emile about better food. He’s not teaching Emile that he’s a Follower; he’s teaching him that he’s a Consumer who has a right to better nourishment than what he’s been getting.
There’s a reason why the most feared man in the entire film is not the chef, but the critic. The entire enterprise will be a failure if the critic doesn’t like it. Personally, I saw it as a wry commentary about Pixar’s position at the top of the animation food chain (pun intended) and the fear that this film that Bird took over from a longtime Pixar employee (who subsequently left the company) would be the first bomb from Pixar. Not to mention that the artist is positioned as a tiny rat trying to wrestle art from a full-size human, which I’m sure is what leading a team of animators sometimes feels like.
No, they were all about girls getting the guy in the end, therefore fulfilling their roles as females.
I have to admit I like Mulan better than the others, because Mulan gets to save China on her way to getting the guy. Pocahontas is the worst; I think that movie spends at least 30 minutes doing nothing but checking out her babelicious bod as she slinks through the forest.
Someone higher in the thread said a banana is sometimes just a banana. That might be true on the individual level — you can always find a reason why any individual protagonist in a movie “had” to be male. But when you look out over the larger landscape of kids’ movies, it’s hard to find any with female characters who aren’t there to serve as moms, girlfriends, helpmeets, or love interests in relation to male characters.
A friend of mine has a 16-year-old daughter who wants to be a screenwriter. Her imagination has been schooled almost entirely in male-dominated imagery. She idolizes Tarantino and all her screenplays are about boys or men. After she writes them, she decides she needs a girl in them somewhere and goes back and adds one. She’s a girl and she doesn’t even write about girls, and looking at Hollywood, why would she? We raise kids in a sea of gendered images and storylines, then wonder why there’s so little meaningful representation of girls and woman in popular media.
Slight clarification to my above rant: I’m not saying that there are Natural Artists and The Rest of Us. That annoys me, because it implies things like, Mozart was a greater composer than Beethoven because Beethoven had to work harder at it. Just that when it comes to art, some level of talent exists before one starts the laborious process of growing and improving one’s art.
A friend of mine has a 16-year-old daughter who wants to be a screenwriter. Her imagination has been schooled almost entirely in male-dominated imagery. She idolizes Tarantino and all her screenplays are about boys or men.
Did she even see “Kill Bill”?!?
More seriously, if she’s willing to watch it, see if you can find an Australian movie called “High Tide,” starring Judy Davis. Watch the whole film, and then let her know that the Judy Davis character was originally written as a man but was turned into a woman with only minor changes.
Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with women writing action films, or crime films. My thesis was a modern film noir with a male protagonist … who learns that all of his macho bullshit actually makes things worse. See if you can get her to watch some Samuel Fuller films, who was one of Tarantino’s idols. Fuller has some really fascinating critiques of masculinity, especially in “Shock Corridor.” And as far as Fuller is concerned, there’s absolutely no reason a prostitute or a junkie can’t be the romantic heroine of the film — she doesn’t even have to be “redeemed.” A couple of other great Fuller films are “Underworld USA” (with a very young Cliff Robertson) and “The Naked Kiss,” where the heroine is a prostitute who becomes a pediatric nurse and discovers that “respectable” people are just as bad, if not worse, than she is.
This idea that The Incredibles is really about working together, or whatever, is such crap. The Nomanisan Island thing is cute, but it doesn’t really tie into the rest of the movie in any real way. Not only that, but Mr. Incredible working with his family doesn’t exactly democratize the distribution of power in the society portrayed in the film. Like, oh, it’s his children’s birthright to be powerful, and Mr I should have known that.
Syndrome being an example of the generous interpretation of the film (it’s actually got good politics!) when Mr Incredible doesn’t want to work with him is just silly. The reasons that Mr Incredible doesn’t want to work with him are clear for within the narrative - 1) he’s irritating and portrayed as fawning, 2) he’s weak and would be more likely an ad hoc hostage than a super team mate, 3) he’s a child that Mr I doesn’t want to be responsible for. And Mr I being a good person in real life at his insurance job doesn’t make him heroic, it makes him non-evil, and plenty of people without super powers act in selfless ways every day. To make a point about his character that he is different from the masses in that he is bucking the insurance system is both aiming low and dismissing the possibility of similar good being done by average people.
As for Syndrome’s threat “if everyone is special, no one is,” it only makes sense in a Randian reading of the film. If we take it seriously it means that power to the people in the form of technology to make them super is dangerous to the order of how things ought to be in the minds of the creators. It’s dangerous to the supremacy of the Incredible family. There’s a lot of support for this view within the narrative, like the sub plot of Jr’s desire to win running races. His frustration at not being able to compete isn’t based on his love of running, but about being denied his entitlement. It isn’t somehow noble to want trophies because you were born with ability.
As for Ratatouille, yeah, Roxanne’s reading of the film only makes sense in terms of the rest of the gender discourse in society. The description she gives isn’t by itself accusatory of sexism, if you take a second and examine the statement. That some some men will be better than some women at things even when those women work hard isn’t sexist, it’s reality. It’s just as realistic as some women being better than some men at things even when the men have worked really hard at them. So Roxanne’s statement is a pretty bad criticism of the film.
That said, does much of the popular media express the idea that some people are special, and far above all other people and we should get out of their way and let them be geniuses or whatever? Sure. Are these people more often men? Yep. Popular media does, by aggregate, reflect quite a lot of societal biases in favor of men and the elite. And, or course, perpetuates such biases.
This movie is fantasy. like on the order of lord of the rings.
the worst social flaws of people working in a kitchen are hiding a secret special rat and a head chef who’s a jerk. that’s it? No heroin junkies? no creepy 30 year olds who owns more porn than square footage in his apartment? no one who’s a registered sex offender? Kids watching this movie might get the idea that there are decent human beings who work in commercial kitchens. Which just isn’t the case.
Also, Remy didn’t really need to be male. But I’m not sure how I’d react to Patton Oswalt doing a woman’s voice (and there’s no reason for this movie without him.)
Also, Randians actually surpass Solipsists in pure irritating power. Brad Bird isn’t Randian. His body of work is generally readable as an anti-randian screed. His definition of a Superman is one who sacrifices themselves for the good of others, fer cryin’ out loud.
But when you look out over the larger landscape of kids’ movies, it’s hard to find any with female characters who aren’t there to serve as moms, girlfriends, helpmeets, or love interests in relation to male characters.
Here you go. And here. And this.
Aimed at children, strong central female characters *and* romance.
mnemosyne I salute you for having the stomach to read more than one Ayn Rand book.
Dan,
OMG! I make a point about over simplification of literature and you took it literally! I guess there really are people as stupid as you on the internet! You get the Ric Romero award of the day!
I think we see the Rand we imagine, not the Rand as is.
Yeah, but Phoenician, Miyazaki really is cheating — he’s not like our movies, he’s like movies from some other dimension. (The Utopian version of our world!) God, I love those movies. I raised the kid on them. Plus? Really pretty!
And Mnemosyne, isn’t that like the smurfette principal? By which I mean, just because some movies exist that have female leads, or female characters in them, that doesn’t mean it is, nevertheless, untrue that the landscape of movies still trains us to expect male protagonists — that we still, therefore, visualize a world where men always take the lead, are at the center; men are who the story is (by default) about? (As this thread demonstrates, I think.)
Which means, and this is why it matters, that’s going to be our worldview as well, mostly.
Here’s the why of my cryptic comment:
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2007/08/km-munshi-and-ayn-rand.html
KM Munshi was a follower of Gandhi, freedom fighter, the “father of modern Gujarati drama”, novelist in Gujarati and English, the founder of a university, the governor of an Indian state, one of the authors of the Indian Constitution, etc., etc.
I guess we can ask the standard feminist literature questions here:
1) is there more than one female character?
2) do they talk to each other?
3) … about something other than men?
I haven’t seen Ratatouille yet, but if those questions are answered with a “no”, at least in the sense of not questioning the patriarchal privilege of having movies being “all about the menz”, Amanda’s right and there’s a problem with the movie from a feminist perspective. Doesn’t mean it’s not a good (or great) movie, but it’s not a feminist one.
I’ll repeat - to the extent that this is true about Ratatouille, it’s true about pretty much every hero story ever told. It’s a narrative format, Remy has a form of “protagonist power” that gives him an edge over the other characters in the story because it is about him. It’s a story. You could write a story about a rat who wasn’t the greatest chef in France or who was a female or who turned out to be not as good as the female chef who had been slaving away for years but these stories would not have been Ratatouille and, honestly, wouldn’t have been as compelling if the central character had still been the rat. You could have written the story about Collette, but then Remy would have been much harder to make into anything other than a superfluous Disneyesque animal helper. It would have been a different story.
Brad Bird didn’t want to write a story about the power of supermen to rule us. He wanted to write a story about a Rat who wants to be a chef. That story, to be told well, needs certain things that may, if you’re geared towards it, come across as Randian. This, I would say, says more about your own personal hot buttons (as well as, it seems, a belief that movies have one big simple political message which is their entire raison d’etre) than it does about the director.
Bull. Shit. There aren’t any trophies in the scene where Dash finally cuts loose - he’s running away from robots that are trying to kill him. But he realises that he’s so fast he’s running on water and the immaculately Pixar-realised expression on his face is total joy and excitement at finally being able to do what he’s good at. For a moment he forgets the robots. He doesn’t sulk earlier in the film because he’s denied his entitlement, he sulks because he’s a child.
mnemosyne: As I said earlier, not everyone has the same talents. I know you don’t like to hear it, but that’s kinda what life is like.
Actually, there has been quite a bit of research into what makes a good or great artist, and “natural talent” is much less important than the time spent practicing the art. It certainly is possible for you to become a professional artist. However it would require spending the time equivalent of a full-time job, with overtime, for the next 12 years to get there. (Actually the bar for making a living off your art is probably quite a bit lower. Most art jobs don’t require that one be the next Kahlo.) Mozart and Beethoven may have had an advantage of perfect pitch, and a good physique for the instruments they mastered, but they also had dominating fathers who filled every minute of their day with theory, technique, practice and rehearsal.
Another myth of “artistic/scientific genius” is that great artists produce overall high-quality and memorable works. Mozart in particular composed hundreds of lesser known works with considerable plagiarism and self-plagiarism. Twyla Tharp also dismisses the notion of her success as due to some magical talent. Rather she claims that her obsessive habit of documenting and storing every idea, no matter how trivial or relevant to her current projects. Retrospectives of Einstein point out that he published rarely, spending years chasing down dead-ends. (And when he was wrong, his reputation set Cosmology back by a decade.)
Certainly, natural talent is a factor, but it’s not an overwhelming factor, or even the primary factor. And the “talented hero” narrative in which the protagonist comes from nowhere with no formal training or practice to get the better of more experienced people in the field is also a myth. (And of course, everyone here knows that Amadeus is fiction, based primarily on a play by Pushkin and 19th century nationalist propaganda?)
I think that concerns that Pixar is becoming a Ranoid propaganda front are dismissed by Cars, in which McQueen gets success by learning that he can’t win on his own, and sacrifices his own short-term success in the interests of integrity and fair play.
Still, I do think that Pixar has a bit of a blind spot in regards to gender. Granted, it perhaps is a reaction to the whole Disney princess phenomenon, but how many movies have they done in which female characters are marginalized?
And Mnemosyne, isn’t that like the smurfette principal? By which I mean, just because some movies exist that have female leads, or female characters in them, that doesn’t mean it is, nevertheless, untrue that the landscape of movies still trains us to expect male protagonists — that we still, therefore, visualize a world where men always take the lead, are at the center; men are who the story is (by default) about?
My very first comment on this thread was a link to the See Jane Foundation, which is dedicated to getting a better gender balance in chldren’s films. So, no, I’m not arguing that “Ratatouille” is a feminist film. I’m arguing that complaining that it was about a male rat and not a female human is a stupid argument. It’s like saying, “You know ‘The Godfather’ would have been a much better movie if it had been about migrant farm workers instead of gangsters.” The movie is what it is, and the specifics of it should be criticized on their own merits, not what you wanted it to be.
That said, if we want to start criticizing the children’s entertainment industry as a whole and pointing out that “Ratatouille” is just another small cog in the machine that forces gender roles on children, I’m with you.
Certainly, natural talent is a factor, but it’s not an overwhelming factor, or even the primary factor. And the “talented hero” narrative in which the protagonist comes from nowhere with no formal training or practice to get the better of more experienced people in the field is also a myth.
I tried to pull back on that a bit but, yes, I’m sure that if I worked 12 hours a day for 12 years, I could eventually draw reasonably well. That doesn’t invalidate the fact that there are people out there who don’t have to work as hard at it as I would have to. It’s like saying, “Oh, anyone can be a mathematician if they work hard enough at it!” Sure, probably, but you get to the point of diminishing returns if you have to spend all day, every day, trying to develop a skill that comes more easily to some people.
Still, I do think that Pixar has a bit of a blind spot in regards to gender. Granted, it perhaps is a reaction to the whole Disney princess phenomenon, but how many movies have they done in which female characters are marginalized?
Pretty much … every single one of them. I think the only two where the female lead is at least important to the story are “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” Otherwise … “Toy Story”? “Monsters Inc.”? No women in sight, even if Roz does turn out to be the head of the monster equivalent of the FBI.
This idea that “The Incredibles” is really about working together, or whatever, is such crap.
Yes, it’s such crap that it’s CONSTANTLY DISCUSSED IN THE MOVIE. It’s such crap that several plot points turn on it.
Seriously, did you at least see the movie first, or did you go in deciding that the secret message of it was “Aryan Supermen Are Our Superiors”?
And, again, if anyone can point to me where Rand said that her elite has a responsibility to anonymously serve the rest of humanity, please point it out to me, because I never saw it.
He wanted to write a story about a Rat who wants to be a chef.
Which, of course, in order to avoid being “political,” must be male. Because a female rat–and really, go through the text, other than changing pronouns, the story can remain as is, unless you’re enough of a gender essentialist to think that a human male would speak differently to a female rat, fercryinoutloud–could have taken the exact same role: wanting to be a chef, dealing with and eventually standing up to parental disapproval, having to struggle against those in positions of power who make essentialist judgments, but ultimately following her dream and achieving some level of success. Making Remy a male IS a political statement. It says “the default is Male.” Which is the default position, even, it seems, among many of those posting to this thread.
mnomosyne: I tried to pull back on that a bit but, yes, I’m sure that if I worked 12 hours a day for 12 years, I could eventually draw reasonably well. That doesn’t invalidate the fact that there are people out there who don’t have to work as hard at it as I would have to. It’s like saying, “Oh, anyone can be a mathematician if they work hard enough at it!” Sure, probably, but you get to the point of diminishing returns if you have to spend all day, every day, trying to develop a skill that comes more easily to some people.
The basic point is that it never* comes easy. If you look across fields at the people regarded as celebrated geniuses, almost all of them have devoted years of their life, spending all day, every day at their skill. It’s true of artists, chess players, mathematicians, and great chefs. Celebrated geniuses are celebrated geniuses primarily because they are obsessive workers who started at a young age. They also tend to be obsessive workers as adults, investing a lot of time and energy on mediocre work to find the few gems.
* there is of course always an exceptional case.
Except the rat spent a whole 15 minutes being a chef and not a lifetime. Enter echo-boomer angst about being in the workforce for 15 minutes and not yet achieving “vice-president of the world bank” status.
Star Wars, as someone mentioned in jest above, is seriously and truly a manifestation of the Übermensch myth; it’s an endemic problem throughout fantasy, and though it’s not as universal, it’s also a big problem in science fiction. David Brin wrote extensively on the topic here. Not all heroic figures need to be inherently heroic.
So, any takers on explaining how The Iron Giant was Randian?
JW, you already went on about how Remy should have been female way upthread, and you’ve been answered at least once. (Also see comment 67.)
All of this debate over Remy’s maleness would make a whole lot more sense if his maleness were ever actually known by the other (human) characters in the film. When does Linguini or any other human notice that Remy is a male? They don’t even know he has a name at all, let alone that it’s a male name. Only his fellow rats are aware of his sex.
And I really, really don’t understand the complaints towards the top of the thread that all of the hundreds of rats are male. How do you know?
Actually, grendelkahn, you dear, sweet sugarbeet, I *commented briefly* that Remy COULD–not should–have been female. What I got in response was the equivalent of “but then you’d just bitch about about *that*,” which is not addressing the relative truth or falsity of the matter, but rather, a shutting down of the line of questioning. If you’d like to actually engage the issue (giving me a reason why Remy MUST be male, or dealing with the fact that there’s a whole lot of blind gender privelege being tossed about haphazardly) I’d be more than happy to read your response, rather than your thinly veiled STFU.
“The basic point is that it never* comes easy. If you look across fields at the people regarded as celebrated geniuses, almost all of them have devoted years of their life, spending all day, every day at their skill. It’s true of artists, chess players, mathematicians, and great chefs. Celebrated geniuses are celebrated geniuses primarily because they are obsessive workers who started at a young age. They also tend to be obsessive workers as adults, investing a lot of time and energy on mediocre work to find the few gems.”
That’s something I would agree with but also something different than what you were saying earlier. I don’t think anyone seriously believe that great artists or other talented individuals’ talents or skills solely come to them naturally. The ‘amadeus’ myth that great music just flows from the genius composer’s fingers or the great prose just flows effortlessly from the great writer’s pen. But the idea that “genius” is merely a product of intense grooming and effort and relative disparities between people in terms of talent or skill is due to the relative differences in “effort” they have put into their work is wrongheaded, and potentially pernicious in it’s own way depending on what context it’s used in.
Art of any kind is probably too subjective to make comparisons so instead I’ll use professional sports, and I apologize if the subject is unfamiliar. Kobe Bryant and Brent Barry are both men of similiar physical proportions and economic backgrounds. They both had fathers who were successful NBA players and they both spent the bulk of their respective childhoods and time as young adults immersed in basketball, playing basketball and being groomed for a future professional career in basketball by parents and related parties who spent a great deal of time and money facilitating their children’s development in this area. This ambition was shared by the children and they spent a great deal of time and effort honing and perfecting their individual basketball skills. The efforts paid off and thanks in large part to the time and interest their father’s devoted to their basketball development, the unique expertise they were able to impart to their children, and the fact that they had sufficient economic comfort to devote so much time, effort and money, not to mention all the work put in by the men themselves to improve and refine their own skills, they were both able to make it to the NBA (no small feat) and of this writing are both veterans of the league who have enjoyed steady careers. However, while Brent Barry has always been at most an average player at his position by NBA standards, Kobe Bryant is a bona fide superstar, among the elite players of the league and has been for quite some time.
This is not to say there weren’t actual differences in how well each were groomed as players or how much work they put into their own development. But I don’t think the (rather large) gap between the quality of basketball play exhibited between Kobe Bryant and Brent Barry is accounted for by measurable differences in their grooming as players or the individual work involved. More succinctly, I don’t think Brent Barry isn’t or never has been anywhere near as good as Kobe Bryant because he didn’t practice enough.
Wait, I figured the lead rat was female, based on the promo posters. (Haven’t seen the film yet.) I mean, has anyone here spent much time with rats? It’s incredibly easy to tell whether a rodent is male or female. (hint: GIANT BALLS)
It wasn’t a thinly veiled STFU; it was a request to engage the response you’d already gotten rather than repeat yourself. The response was that, in short, making Remy female would have led to a more objectionable movie rather than a less objectionable one. I assume you didn’t just mean “COULD”; the story COULD have included a Magic Negro, but I don’t think you would have considered that an improvement.Is misspelling my name (honestly, it’s written right there) and referring to me with diminutives supposed to be a “thinly veiled STFU” to me?
murcielago: You expected the Hollywood establishment that gave us bulls with udders in Barnyard to give us anatomically-correct gigantic rat testes?
Phoenician — As I mentioned before, there’s a big difference between Japanese import movies and a movie like “Ratatouille.”
Ratatouille = big budget, big release American movie made by guys, about guys. Currently you can walk into just about any movie house in the U.S. and see it at any hour. See also: Cars, A Bug’s Life, Aladdin, Lion King, Meet the Robinsons, Wallace and Grommit, Tarzan, Pirates of the Caribbean, Monsters Inc., Shrek, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Spongebob Squarepants, etc., etc.
Japanese anime = lower budget, small release import movies made for adults but which happen to feature children and appeal to children. You might catch one at an art house theater, but you’ll probably have to wait until it comes to video. You have to know they exist and deliberately seek them out. See also: well, that handful of movies you mentioned, which were all made at least five years ago.
My overall point remains. Boys get to see themselves as protagonists in a wide variety of stories that are plentiful, well-financed, and easily accessible, even when it wouldn’t make a difference to the storyline whether the protagonist is a girl or a boy. Girls get variations on the theme of how animals will help you get your prince if you’re pretty and kind, except for certain import movies that are not well known or readily available.
Right, a typo renders my point moot. Got it.
Would have rendered the film more objectionable to whom? That’s the central question, friend, and one that you still have not answered. Fortunately, Linden has spelled it out for you, in the first sentence of the last paragraph there. Way to hammer on OT.
Also, there are far too many “magic negroes” in films already. And you know why? Because the same white dudes who finance films and relegate female characters to love interests or ball-busters can’t imagine black people any other way.
DRR: But the idea that “genius” is merely a product of intense grooming and effort and relative disparities between people in terms of talent or skill is due to the relative differences in “effort” they have put into their work is wrongheaded, and potentially pernicious in it’s own way depending on what context it’s used in.
But of course, I didn’t say that. What I did say was “Certainly, natural talent is a factor, but it’s not an overwhelming factor, or even the primary factor.” Quite a bit of research has been done on this, and pretty consistently “natural talent” is not the primary factor behind career success.
Art of any kind is probably too subjective to make comparisons …
Nonsense, while there may be some disagreement in terms of raking those people within the top 1% of their field, it’s not that hard to separate the top 1% from the rest. And of course, you can say that there is some kind of inherent difference in talent between Bryant and Barry, but the nature of professional sports is such that both Bryant and Barry are, for all practical purposes, the “cream of the crop.” Barry may be mid-ranked by NBA standards. But compared to the population of all athletes, he’s a member of the elite.
In addition, professional athletics probably shouldn’t be compared to the arts (including haute cuisine) because athletics is so physically selective. Not that the arts are not physical, but Cole Porter, David Baker, and Julie Andrews are three examples of artists who were able to continue their careers after a serious injury limited their performance ability.
JW, at no point did I state that a typo made your point moot. Very deft sidestepping the issue of using diminutives toward me, though–does your typo render my point moot?
If you read the comments to which I’m now referring for the third time, the film would have been more objectionable to the same audience that is finding it objectionable that Remy was male. Please actually read the comments.
I’m certainly not denying that movies, especially children’s movies in this case, portray a stunningly gender-biased world which sends very different messages to boys and to girls. I do deny that flipping Remy’s gender would have made it a better movie, or would have addressed the central concerns here.
And yes, the whole point of my “Magic Negro” example is that adding one doesn’t improve a movie. How was that not clear?
Clearly the “casting” in Ratatouille conforms to the male=default standard that’s so common in pop culure. And clearly that tradition is a sexist one. But Roxanne’s post seemed to agrue that there was additional sexism operating in the way Colette’s character was presented, and that strikes me as be a bit of a stretch.
If Colette’s character were itself a part of the problem, then presumably the movie’s treatment of gender would be improved if she were made male and some other character were made female instead. As folks have suggested above, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious candidate for such a swap.
So yes, the genre convention that dictates that all but one or two of the characters in a story be male is a sexist one, absolutely. And yes, Ratatouille is guilty of that brand of sexism. (Though interestingly, The Incredibles wasn’t. Wonder why not?) But I’m still not buying Roxanne’s original argument.
Hear hear.
JW–I’m not saying that you shouldn’t complain that Remy is male because you would have also complained if Remy had been female. I’m saying that the complaints raised if Remy were female would have been right. Female has inborn cooking talent. Objectionable gender stereotype. Female wins over critic with food like mama used to make. Objectionable gender stereotype. Female controls male by pulling his hair and making him dance like a puppet. Highly objectionable gender stereotype. And so on.
Like mnenosyne said, this isn’t an argument that Ratatouille is a feminist film. I think that Collette’s speech about her exclusion from the kitchen is reproduced in Remy’s exclusion, and it’s quite frank about sexism, privilege, and adaptive strategies, but those are part of the larger theme rather than the theme itself. More problematic, there’s only one female character who exists primarily as the love interest for a mostly unlikeable male lead.
It is, however, an argument that “Remy could have been female!” is not a good criticism. If anything, Remy’s gender is used to play against gendered expectations. It would have been an interesting movie if it had been more female-focused, but it would have been a very, very different one as well. And while nothing says we can’t or shouldn’t have that different movie, there is an infinite number of different movies Ratatouille could have been.
I’m put in mind of a Washington Post review of “Batman Begins” that complained the movie wasn’t campy like the TV show. Sure, it wasn’t, that doesn’t tell us anything about the merits or demerits of the film. It might tell us something about the industry–Hollywood isn’t making enough campy films!–but that’s a separate issue.
Roxanne: Actually, Remy spends a lot of time reading the chef’s book and watching the television show. It’s not on-screen, but he knows the recipes and things like what Gusteau says about saffron.
This is, and I can’t imagine it actually could be, even sillier than the “Velma is gay” and “Incredibles is about Ayn Rand” lunatics.
How, exactly, is Collette dismissed any differently in ability than any other chef in the movie? The point is they were ALL afraid to take the risks and present the drive Remy did. The reason Remy was depicted as a better chef than the others was because, well, he WAS.
Roxanne, if your claim that the message is a rat is a better chef than a woman, I’d expect at least a casual example from the movie where that’s implied. Your statement says Remy makes a better chef, and yet it doesn’t explain WHY he does. WHY does Remy make a better chef than Collette, and then WHAT does his gender (which is, by the way, never even disclosed to the characters in the movie, only to the audience) have to do with it?
If there’s no explanation here, then the anger appears to be solely that Patton Oswalt happened to be cast in the role and therefore the lead character was male.
I love you guys here but people grasping for “hidden meanings” in cartoons is a lifelong pet peeve of mine and I’m going to call you on this silliness. Sorry.
The Chief - First things first, go fuck yourself. Your point was about over simplification, and my point was that Roxanne’s whole post was bad, not because it oversimplified but because it didn’t give any context to its criticism. If you’re saying the context I suggested that would have made the criticism valid is wrong, how about some evidence or argument as opposed to insult. Hm, how about engaging in the ideas?
mnemosyne - Yeah, I’ve seen the movie, more than once, and I get your point, I just disagree with you. For one thing, I gave a lot of evidence in my post as to why the message of that movie was somewhat Randian. Allow me to adjust my claim, and let’s see if we both agree with it. Ok, how about this: the message of the movie is at various times various things, and for a substantial portion of the film is not about the virtues of working together. In an attempt to give motivation to various characters to make the plot work VERY BAD WRITING was done. The intent of the film may have been to show that working together is important blah blah blah, but the result incorporates a lot of other ideology because the script is shoddy and the creators thought no one would notice. So you not only have people working together as a plot driver at multiple points, you also have characters developed as entitled brats and a villain whose message is not entirely menacing, a0nd to fight against that message isn’t exactly an ideological battle that makes a super hero look good.
Daniel Turner: word, Incredibles was a muddled movie in many ways.
But when you look out over the larger landscape of kids’ movies, it’s hard to find any with female characters who aren’t there to serve as moms, girlfriends, helpmeets, or love interests in relation to male characters.
Not that this justifies the glaring lack of female characters in cartoons, but Disney to their credit has made four animated daytime series in the last five years with female leads- Kim Possible, Brandy & Mr. Whiskers, The Proud Family, and Lilo & Stitch. In all four, a female character is depicted as the strong, self-assertive heroine, in only one (and only the last season) is there any romantic association with a male co-lead, and in the latter two the main characters are not only female but non-white, which is amazing given the standards of cartoons only twenty years ago. Disney has a load of problems but they deserve recognition for that.
In contrast, Disney has made only two- TWO- feature animated films with a female lead not supplemental to a male lead: Lilo & Stitch (the movie) and Alice in Wonderland. They were made over fifty years apart from each other.
Daniel, The Incredibles is to a great extent a movie about family — about the bonds of love and obligation between spouses, and between parents and children. These are not questions that Ayn Rand ever showed much interest in, and they are not presented here in a particularly Randian way. Beyond that, the movie is grounded in the superhero genre, and takes as a given the genre convention that heroes are heroes not because of their powers alone, but because they use those powers for the common good. No, the Incredibles aren’t self-abnegating, but that’s precisely the point — the filmmakers see self-realization and public service as mutually reinforcing.
All of this is at odds with Rand, and all of it must be addressed in an argument that The Incredibles is an Objectivist tract. Yes, there are moments that Rand would have liked in the movie, but if all it takes to make a movie Randian is a few such moments, then the claim is virtually meaningless.
How, exactly, is Collette dismissed any differently in ability than any other chef in the movie?
At one point in the film, Linguini is preparing a dish with Colette’s help and he literally waves her away from the plate at the urging of the rat.
Brooklynite - My point is that major portions of the message in the movie are Randian. And I’d disagree that the movie is *about* those bonds of love and obligation more than it includes those bonds. Heck, I’m going to watch it right now though, I’ll look for that too.
JW
Fact: real kitchens in real restaurants are really, really male oriented.
Fact: Remy was a fucking rat.
Opinion: layering too many challenges onto a protagonist can really clunk up a story and ruin the flow.
Opinion: if you want to address the issue of gender disparities in a movie about kitchens where the protagonist already has an entire species/language bias issue to deal with, you are almost certainly better off dealing with it in a supporting character or a subplot.
Opinion: Collette probably had an interesting film with her as the protagonist, but the first thing I’d do if I were writing that film would be to write Remy out of it or make him a figment of Linguini’s imagination. Or, in other words, write a different movie.
Opinion: If Remy was female, the other way of dealing with the inherent gender bias in kitchens without clunking up the plot would be to completely ignore it and create a fictional world where being female was no barrier to success at all.
Opinion: from a purely writing point of view, Ratatouille could have either engaged with the issue of women working in kitchens or had a female protagonist. To try and get both in there would have seriously over-egged the political side of what is, after all, a children’s movie. Pixar made a choice to address the issue through a subplot. Presumably, you would have written it differently. Sucks to be you.
Opinion: Some of the rat supporting characters could have been female and it wouldn’t have damaged the plot. It wouldn’t, however, have helped it that much or done anything than provide some female comic relief.
Opinion: it’s not a feminist film, although it could do far worse at addressing feminist concerns.
Fact: when making a choice between a “feminist” film which kludges along to get its point across and which people think sucks because of the weight of the moral message, and a fun little film with a generally positive message about lots of things that doesn’t necessarily set out to right every social wrong and which people want to go and see, there isn’t a producer in Hollywood who will pick the former. This isn’t because they’re sexist bastards - they might be but it’s not the reason - it’s because they want to make money.
At one point in the film, Linguini is preparing a dish with Colette’s help and he literally waves her away from the plate at the urging of the rat.
But he didn’t do it because she was female, he did it because he thought the dish would taste better. Later in the movie Colette also relents on making Ratatouille because it’s a “peasant’s dish.” It’s another example of how Collette doesn’t want to take a risk in the kitchen. I don’t see where her gender is suggested as the reason for this, as the other chefs act the same way in various scenes. The others don’t want to risk helping Linguini at the end of the film. The head chef doesn’t want to restore Gasteau’s status but instead become profitable off of cheap sub-par food.
Daniel, I guess I’d ask you to look at what makes the characters happy, and what they value. I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap there with what contented Rand heroes look like.
Yes, there are themes of frustration with conformity and the cult of self-esteem running through the movie, but neither of those themes are specific to Rand. You don’t have to be an Objectivist to think that graduation ceremonies for second graders are bullshit.
McDuff: It seems to me that you are making an false dichotomy between “fun” and “pro-feminist.” Pixar has had success with bringing in important female characters with Incredibles, and Lassiter was instrumental in convincing Disney to give Miyazaki wide release, with both critical and popular success. If anything the critical and popular success of Miyazaki’s films, which have strong primary and secondary female characters, should be evidence that Pixar could make money with better representation of women.
Daniel Turner
I’m not sure it’s possible for me to disagree with you more here. I just don’t know what film you were watching or, if you were watching the same one, what “good writing” would look like to you.
So, your objections are that the characters have more than one level to them, the characters sometimes had seemingly conflicting motivations for their actions, and that the villain wasn’t iredeemably bad? Fair enough, Syndrome’s supposed aim of remaking the world into some kind of utopia where everyone is a superhero doesn’t seem that bad if you’re ten years old, but that was the point, it’s a power fantasy in the mind of a ten year old boy who’s never grown up. His method of achieving his utopia was embarking on a crusade to cause havoc and destruction and then appearing to save the day and have everyone recognise him as a new kind of hero. At the risk of overanalysing the motivations of a comic book supervillain, you don’t have to be a genius to work out that if he’d wanted to sell his super-boots to the general public he wouldn’t have to do the “destroy New York” part first.
And real people have conflicting motivations. Real people do the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the right reasons. Hell, it really does sound like you’re describing “good writing” as “bad writing” because it’s too hard for you to understand and you want everything to have a simple political statement that you can fit into a box. That’s not how stories work. At least, not any stories people want to read or watch.
There’s your problem. You’re going through the film looking for all the secret hidden coded messages and political statements you think are there, and ascribing motivations to writers other than “this will look cool on screen” or “I think this character would do this here” or “this would probably happen next.” In other words, you’re a postmodern literature critic, not a real writer at all.
Whoop, misplaced copy and paste, the following is mine:
Sorry for the accidental identity switch
Japanese anime = lower budget, small release import movies made for adults but which happen to feature children and appeal to children. You might catch one at an art house theater, but you’ll probably have to wait until it comes to video.
Demand, more than supply.
I note Kiki’s Delivery Service appears to be being remade in English.
McDuff - First, you don’t get to claim that the characters are carefully multi layered and complex and then say that it’s all just a comic book. As for political statements fitting neatly into a box, no, I don’t need or expect that, but if the film is busy moralizing and is about archetypes, then I’d expect their political statement to be coherent. And as for “my problem,” um, no, I’m not a screenwriter. Seriously, your problem is that I’m not a “real writer”? Only “real writers” get to comment about movies? As for my criticism, if there’s some part of it you think is wrong, tell me which part and why. Or is there something wrong with critically engaging art and media?
“Syndrome’s supposed aim of remaking the world into some kind of utopia where everyone is a superhero doesn’t seem that bad if you’re ten years old, but that was the point, it’s a power fantasy in the mind of a ten year old boy who’s never grown up.” I think this statement shows how much you’re buying into the mythology of the film without thinking it through. The current superheros are good and noble, but if the people had power then the earth would end. Pretty anti-democratic of you. In that world, I’d want super powers to survive the city destroying fights between the “good” and “evil” powerful people. People could save their own babies from burning buildings when the heroes aren’t around. My point isn’t that if everyone essentially carried a gun the world would be great, but that in a world where a fair number of unaccountable people have massive power I’d want some power as well. I don’t think the world’s been doing that well with America as the sole superpower, despite the number of people who think of America as noble but occasionally blundering.
grendelkhan,
“JW, you already went on about how Remy should have been female way upthread, and you’ve been answered at least once.”
An answer that ignores the one character configuration that absolutely and obviously bypasses any similar problematic reading: both the rat and the puppert could have been female.
As someone who owned pet rats as a kid, I can attest that every single rat in that movie was female. Deep-voiced, pronoun-confused, eyelash-lacking females, perhaps, but females nonetheless. Male rats have extremely obvious genitalia.
I haven’t seen Ratatouille so i can’t comment on it, but i can’t let this comment pass:
damn the second blockquote isn’t supposed to be blockquoted.
My point being that it’s the ‘one significant female character by story’ rule that creates something to be read into the story, not the critical audience, as Petey implied.
That’s not the plot of the movie, it’s a plot point in the movie. But yes, there are several moments that carry a similar message — Bob’s mocking of his son’s upcoming fourth-grade “graduation” is one. Is that all it takes to make a movie Objectivist, though? Mockery of the idea that everyone’s equally “special” and that our routine accomplishments should be celebrated as if they were grand achievements?
Brad Bird is obviously interested in the question of how people with outsized talents can find fulfillment and happiness in an often contentedly mediocre world. Ayn Rand was interested in the same question. But they approach the question from profoundly different perspectives, and they answer it in profoundly different ways. To claim that Bird’s movies are Objectivist because of their subject matter is about as compelling as an argument that The Backyardigans is Communist because it promotes sharing.
CBrachyrhynchos
Sure, but not in this movie. I don’t believe that the story wasn’t worth telling just because they couldn’t shoehorn some more female characters into it. I’m not saying that you can’t make money with strong female protagonists, I’m saying that many factors in Ratatouille meant that it wasn’t the story to have them in.
In a perfectly equal world, 50% of the films would still have male protagonists, you know.
Daniel Turner
One, I didn’t. Two, you should read more comic books if you think that there’s anything “just” about the plotting. There are problems with comic book writing but charges of lack of complexity haven’t been relevant for thirty years. I think you’re referring to my statement about the dangers of overanalysing a Comic Book Supervillain, which if you were astute you’d have realised was just me trying to avoid falling into the same trap of reasoning that you repeatedly fall into. I didn’t need to overanalyse the facts of Syndrome’s plan, just look at them to know that it wasn’t about the preservation of a superhero class but about taking out someone who had systematically murdered their friends and was planning on murdering more people. His statements of egalitarianism were suspect because he was a fucking sociopath. That would be enough for most people.
I didn’t spot the moralising. Mainly because presentation of complex motivations and shades of grey isn’t normally what you’d call “moralising.” I… I just don’t know, dude. You’re complaining that it is doing something, then you use the evidence that it isn’t doing it to say that they just aren’t doing it well, despite the fact that it probably just means they weren’t doing it in the first place. It’s like a Kafkaesque nightmare in your head, isn’t it?
I think you should know the first thing about writing before you criticise writing, yes. And I do have a big problem with people approaching every piece of art as if it’s part of the internal philosophical dialogue they have inside their own head and then blaming the artist for not engaging directly with them, and that really seems to be what you’re doing.
You haven’t seen the film, have you? He doesn’t want to “give people power,” except as a means to an end of getting rid of all the supers. It’s the ultimate grudge against a class of people and he’s willing to kill people to get there, and tell them it’s all for their own good. What, you’re unfamiliar with powerful people killing people and saying that it’s for their own good? You can’t see any potential problems with someone laying waste to New York City, appearing as a superhero to get power and influence, and then selling the means of his heroism to others? Really
There you go again. Nothing to do with anything in the movie, but you’re slipping in the political metaphor. It’s not just a comic book movie, but it is a comic book movie. Not everything has to be a grand political statement.
McDuff,
If making a lead character a female is a grand political statement in this day and age, we really have fallen fast.
I saw the movie. They could have easily made the rat a girl. It would have made the character’s relationships more interesting, which is always a good thing, even in cartoons.
Making the default sex of lead characters male is political, BTW. You’re just refusing to see it as such.
I never said that it would be a grand political statement. If you read what I said, I said that for the sake of not weighing the narrative down, there’s a choice in this story of a) making the protagonist female or b) addressing the issues of females in the restaurant industry. Making Remy female AND a rat would have been too much adversity for one character to convincingly carry in a light-hearted movie. So, as any writer who wants to get a theme or issue across without landing it all on the protagonist, you put it in the lap of a subplot with some supporting characters. That way, you get to explore different aspects and play people off each other.
I keep pointing this out, there’s nothing wrong with having a female protagonist, and I’m a huge, massive proponent of seeing more stories with strong, realistic (i.e. not just Brad Pitt’s dialogue with boobs strapped to the front of it), human, female protagonists hit the mainstream. And, yes, I’m well aware that defaulting to male is a reflection of a political situation that is a problem. But for this story I think it would have been a bad writing decision, and I think the team at Pixar, who know how to write a good story with compelling characters better than nearly any other production company going, knew this too.
” But for this story I think it would have been a bad writing decision, and I think the team at Pixar, who know how to write a good story with compelling characters better than nearly any other production company going, knew this too.”
And yet, somehow all those great stories Pixar comes up with center around male characters. Disney has it’s faults too, but at least they make movies featuring girls every once in a while - even if those girls tend to be overly feminine.
Numad: No, even if both the rat and puppet were female, there would have been objections–and legitimate ones, I think–to the rat’s natural cooking ability and winning over the critic with food like mama made.
I second the recommendation for seejane.org. There was a blog about it at Shakesville aaages ago, along with a video with Geena Davis (love her!) talking about the gender disparity in children’s tv- it was a great video, might still be on YouTube I guess.
I respectfully disagree. Little girls who go to see the movie get that little bit more representation on screen and less “othering” of themselves as not the default. Children’s programming is woefully inadequate in providing parity in representations of female characters compared to male.
Also, picking up on another point you made- maybe it would have been nice to have a film which veered off into fantasy, where being a female was no barrier to success. I mean, there is a rat who cooks… one more leap of faith surely wouldn’t cause the suspension of belief to come crashing down? Unless true equality between the sexes is even harder to believe than a top chef rat.
The movie did address the issues of women in the business, McDuff. There would be no need to add one word more on that subject with a female rat lead.
Jeez, you act like there are no female Chefs in the world. My city’s loaded with them. It’s not THAT big a deal.
The writing team you praise is all male. I suspect they don’t write female leads because:
1. It doesn’t occur to them.
2. They, like you, see it as too challenging, what with all the female issues (whatever those are) they’d have to cover.
The movie could have had a female lead without any changes in the script. It could have simply had a female voice. I would like to see the day when a female can lead a film without it being a romantic comedy or a feminist polemic. Just make the character a girl without making the story about being a girl, you know?
[Returns to thread after 24 hrs away]
Wow, no way can I catch up with everything here. Mnemosyne, I did promise to come back and continue the discussion, so I’ll try to respond now to your point about music.
Now you and CBrachyrhynchos had a good exchange on the nature of genius and talent. I actually think the composer exampe kind of supports my point. Yes, Mozart and Beethoven were extraordinarily talented. But their work exists only on paper, until other very talented people give life to it by playing it. Music is composed by people with one kind of talent, and interpreted by people with another kind — otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many different performers out there interpreting classical music in so many ways.
The Ratatouille view seems to me a binary system: the Geniuses and everyone else. A single genius with a crew of untrained, tasteless rats produces better food than a jerk in charge of a crew of talented, dedicated cooks. Now, compare that to music: would you rather listen to people who’ve never picked up instruments play a Mozart symphony, or would you rather hear a talented orchestra perform something written by a lesser talent than Mozart? I’d rather hear the second performance. And the reason is that it’s not all about the Genius coming up with a plan and everyone else just mechanistically following orders.
Once it’s established that Colette and her colleagues are non-Geniuses, they’re treated as the equal of the rats. And I think that’s just crazy. Watch an episode of Iron Chef. It takes tremendous talent to help a challenger or an Iron Chef realize his or her culinary vision. So, when you say:
I absolutely agree, not everyone has the same talents. But Ratatouille recognizes only one kind of talent, that of the Creative Genius. If you don’t have that, you’re just a servant whose value is in how effectively you sign over your will to the genius.
I hinted at an alternate resolution to the film that would have demonstrated a more collaborative or mutually dependent kind of talent, creativity, and genius — one in which Remy rebuilds the restaurant’s reputation by inspiring all the kitchen staff to trust their own tastes and instincts more, to trust that their individual insights are valuable and can fit into a harmonious whole that they create together. But that kind of resolution wouldn’t make sense in the world the filmmakers created in Ratatouille, because Genius is rare, and its intrinsic nature seems to be that it needs to Lead those (non-geniuses) who naturally need to Follow. Which, again, is a pretty repellent vision to me, and also one that doesn’t match my personal experience in how vibrant, creative communities work.
Now, McDuff:
Well, that all depends on how you want to define “hero story”. Is The Seven Samurai a hero story? I think it is, but genius and talent and heroism aren’t treated in that film the way they are in Ratatouille. Is Breaking Away a “hero story?” Again, it certainly depicts talent and dedication and characters triumphing after taking risks, but it doesn’t have the sort of Great Genius dynamic going on that Ratatouille does. Even The Dirty Dozen recognizes the variety of talents and the needs of talented people to rely on other talented people, not just to find drones who will do exactly as they say.
If those aren’t “hero stories,” and you argue that hero stories always involve the magical “protagonist power”, then you’re just stating a tautology: hero stories are hero stories, and Ratatouille, being a hero story, tells a hero story. That seems like kind of a dead-end, argumentatively.
McDuff - First things last, I was making an analogy with my comment about America. Whatever. Your points seem to me to be based on your willingness to classify things as important to the movie things you agree with, and toss aside anything in the movie that disagrees with your interpretation. I think almost all of what we’ve been discussing falls into territory of valid analysis of the flick, which is why I called it bad writing. That the creators aren’t clear in what their message is leads to multiple messages being expressed by the film. My claims are that a large chunk of the message included is a bad message. Your need for unification is like fundies who attempt to unify accounts of the resurrection between the gospels - they assume that it’s unified and then work back from that understanding to figure out how this is so.
As for your problems with people approaching movies from their own viewpoint as if it’s the only valid one or whatever, sure, that’s bad, but that’s not what I was doing. So, get over it, I was making a criticism of the flick based on evidence I saw in the flick. You see all that as window dressing for the real intent of the movie, but haven’t yet provided a justification for why your shit is important and mine isn’t. So when you talk about overanalyzing the Comic Book Supervillain, recognize that you are, for some reason, willing to analyze everything else.
At one point in the film, Linguini is preparing a dish with Colette’s help and he literally waves her away from the plate at the urging of the rat.
Yes, because Colette is trying to put a sauce on the dish that even Gusteau’s recipe card says doesn’t work and makes the dish taste horrible. Remy doesn’t wave her away because she’s just a girl and doesn’t know anything — he waves her away because she’s trying to go by the book and she’s wrong to do it.
I have to head off to yoga, but I couldn’t leave this hanging.
So paying customers in a restaurant are actually the chef’s servants who have signed their will over to that of the genius? Sorry, but that’s the weirdest interpretation of restaurant service I’ve ever heard.
Mnemosyne, I was referring to the kitchen staff/rats, not the customers, who aren’t really characters in the film.
Enjoy your yoga class — I skipped out last night for aikido. Where the hell are our priorities?
Thom,
“Numad: No, even if both the rat and puppet were female, there would have been objections–and legitimate ones, I think–to the rat’s natural cooking ability and winning over the critic with food like mama made.”
No new objections that I can see.
With a more diverse cast (especially if that goes beyond the rat/puppet pair in that specific movie), how could anything be correlated with any weight to a specific character’s sex or gender?
All you’d be left with is the silly plot device of natural ability. As this thread has demonstrated, it’s not like nothing negative can be read into that itself. However, that’s well beyond my point.
Numa: I mean that there would be legitimate objections that a female rat with inborn cooking talent wins over a food critic by cooking like his mother. It plays into gender stereotypes whether the puppet is male or female. By casting the rat as male, you can avoid reinforcing the stereotype of women as naturally domestic who reach the height of their abilities through home-cooking. People might still object if the rat is a male, but the objections are even stronger if the rat is a female. That’s why I don’t agree with the people who are saying that the movie would have been more palatable for feminists if the genders of the principals had just been switched.
I do want to emphasize that I agree with the criticisms of the movie industry and Pixar for creating so many androcentric films. I just disagree that Ratatouille elevates rats above women and that mere gender swaps are an improvement.
Cinderella had a male lead? Was it one of the mice? What about the Little Mermaid? Snow White? Pocahontas? Mulan?
Midwest Product - I think what’s meant by that is in the movies you mentioned the women are all about getting themselves a man. In Snow White, for instance, she gets the prince to rescue her, and then he goes and kills a dragon/witch. It made me cry when I first saw it, but I was probably 5, and the dragon was scary.
Thom,
“Numa: I mean that there would be legitimate objections that a female rat with inborn cooking talent wins over a food critic by cooking like his mother. It plays into gender stereotypes whether the puppet is male or female. By casting the rat as male, you can avoid reinforcing the stereotype of women as naturally domestic who reach the height of their abilities through home-cooking.”
‘Women are naturally domestic’ except for every other female character in the movie, that they be trained cook or other rats?
The objection wouldn’t show the shadow of any legitimacy.
Again, the only objection there would be is the ‘natural cooking ability’ over actual cuisine plot point, which would have nothing to do with gender or sex with the said sex configuration.
Frankly, this whole debate seems really really stupid.
Not because we’re stupid to debate this or to ever wonder about lack of female representation in lead roles in children’s movies and a bunch of other stuff, but rather in the total ignorance of the movie’s good points and ignorance of the context of the times that the piece is presented in.
When I saw Ratouille, twice in a row, I was amazed by the risks it was taking. Here was a movie with an unapologetic francophilia in a time where France is a dirty swear word for much of the country. It contained a Horatio Alger rising from the slums style overcoming adversity tale without the “Pursuit of Happyness” style whitewashing of the serious impediments against you. To me, as a class allegory, it was a more honest tale of rags to riches than we’ve ever seen out of Hollywood in a while. It even twists the happily ever after that even after tasting the immense greatness, they still can’t get over the character’s background. Also look at mop boy and his desperation of the job as he really has to take it as it comes and is living hand to mouth. He also presents the corruption that wealth can bring as the sudden money gives him an excuse to be an asshole. An excuse which is shown quite well to be in grave error both to his relationship with the rat and his girlfriend.
Collette’s character is unprecented. A strong, tough, capable, independent woman who is unapologetically feminist but is very much still regarded as sympathetic. Think on modern society, especially Hollywood and its sinking of any movie with an ounce of feminism and think to the last time an animated kid’s movie directly addressed misogyny in the workplace so openly and frankly. The mace in the alleyway isn’t funny because a woman is daring to defend herself when she is being attacked by someone acting funny (at least to me) but because of the puppet boy’s realiztion of the sheer hideousness of the act and how much he couldn’t blame her and by extension the audience couldn’t blame her if she did mace him.
The theme was about risktaking. All the characters who took risks did so at immediate peril and even though it ended well for each of them, it often did so at a price. Remy sacrificed the safety of his home, his father the security of his warren, mop boy his entire kitchen and privelledge in introducing the rat as the success behind the throne, the critic when he makes a good review that costs him his reputation and privelege, and Collette when she comes back to the rat run kitchen rather than following the rest to utilize the good name of the restaurant and move on before the shit hits the fan. For all of them, privelge was lost but a healthier state of being and success was found. To me, this was also a theme on the risks you take when you stand up for the unprivelged and hated. If you stand up for gay rights, women’s rights, black rights, etc… you stand to lose a comfortable place in society and when you start a new movement, you’ll always be hated for being new and face the harshest weather than any who follow as the first members of any now mass movement can tell you.
On these scores, it was an unapologetically liberal movie which sought to present things now other animated movie in recent memory has tried to show. What no other movie made in Hollywood has shown for a while. Yes, Britain is far ahead of us in the curve as far as progressive entertainment. This is true. To point that out however is not a criticism of this movie, but rather a point of why we need these steps in the Ratatouille direction.
We can complain that it’s not 100% all the way there or that it doesn’t do X or Y, but to do that and ignore the massive risks it took in supporting A-M and by doing so rejecting most of the propping up the ruling class style entertainment we have been force fed is to ask for a lack of any progressive entertainment. I think we should praise what it has accomplished as it has accomplished some things exceedingly well, while we criticize what it hasn’t quite accomplished.
Anyway, that’s just my opinion.
Gayle
Am I talking to myself?
I’ve said, three times now, that from a narrative point of view making Remy female would have been perfectly acceptable. Just driving past the whole social issue and ignoring it is a perfectly valid thing to do in a movie. And, it’s not that there are no female chefs in the world, it’s that chefing is still, by and large, horrendously male dominated. You don’t have to mention that. It’s a valid choice to pretend it doesn’t exist. But what you can’t do is have it present in only half the tiny universe you’ve created. You can’t have being female be a problem for Colette and not for a hypothetical female Remy too. So, as I said, you either put more weight onto the protagonist, which might work in another movie but would have weighed this one down too much, or you lose Collette entirely, which would have been a big loss for all she wasn’t the best sketched character, or you have Remy as a male rat. It’s a writing decision. You can’t just make a good story out of a focus group desire to please particular demographics. Sometimes you’re constrained by the story you want to tell in the choices you make about the characters.
Your argument is all “they could have“. Yes. They most certainly could have. But in doing so they would have lost something else, be that another perspective on an equally feminist issue or just the zip and whizz of the story which, after all, is what Pixar is good at and what pays for all those lovely computers. I have never argued that they couldn’t have done it. I’m arguing that there’s a good reason for not doing it, even for someone with feminist inclinations. You’d have made a different decision, or, maybe, if you were sitting looking at a script with your producers, you’d have made exactly the same one. Or maybe you wouldn’t have been there in the first place because you’d have written a completely different film from the get go. Whatever. They could have made a different film. If you don’t think they should have made this film, by all means don’t watch the thing. If you’re that concerned about the lack of strong female characters in films by Brad Bird made under the Pixar banner, go watch the Incredibles and all your problems will be solved. Otherwise, it just sounds like you’re bitching that they didn’t make exactly the same choices that you’d have made.
Also, what Cerberus said.
Pesto
There are only seven stories in the world, mate. It’s not my fault that the “protagonist power” exists. It’s been around way before Ratatouille and will be around long after. You might as well complain because the boy gets the girl (or vice versa) at the end of a romance story, that the tragic hero is undone by a flaw in his character at the end of his tragic tale, or that a gun introduced in the first act is fired by the end of the third. Odysseus was favoured by the gods, Robin Hood was the greatest bowman in all Sherwood, James Bond can take out a secret base full of men with machine guns and still have time for a witty quip, and Remy’s the best chef in France. You want to write a different story as well? Go for it. Write a story about a rat who wants to be a chef but is merely average. Or write a story about a young girl who makes her way to Head Chef of the finest restaurant in Paris through hard work, dedication and recognition of the talent around her. As long as you realise that your objection is with the very premise rather than the execution, and that you’re essentially saying this movie should never have been made in the first place, you go for it, but I will point out that this story’s existence doesn’t in any sense stop those other two stories being told.
It’s called “complexity” and is the opposite of bad writing. Unless you think that the sole purpose of a film is to express a single, clear political point rather than tell a story which touches on the many facets of human existence, I don’t see how in the world you can think that’s an example of “bad writing.” So, as I say, I think it says more about the predisposition with which you view movies than it does about the writing of this particular one.
Oh, shut the fuck up if you can’t say something sensible. Seriously. You’re taking tiny segments from the middle of the film and not looking at how the story develops, at the resolutions, at the arcs of the characters, at the contexts. It’s the only way you can get where you go with this. You’re treating dialogue like a solioquey straight from the mouth of the director. That is, first and foremost, a surefire recipe for bad writing, which is why good writers don’t do it. See also: Ayn Rand, who did it all the time, and was rubbish.
What the holy hellfire are you talking about? My comment about overanalysing wasn’t aimed at you. You didn’t analyse him at all. You took one fucking line of dialogue and built an entire condemnation of the movie from it. Your entire thesis is based entirely on the premise that “if everyone is special then nobody is” is the be-all and end-all of Syndrome’s character and that’s why he was evil and needed to be defeated. You completely ignored the fact that he’d murdered lots and lots of people and was planning on killing more to achieve this goal, which, I dunno, might make any claims about egalitarianism a tiny bit suspect, don’t you think? He fired missiles at a plane with children in it. And if he’s not a Socialist hero of the people out to bring happiness and butterflies along with the super-boots, but rather a fucking sociopath with a Messiah complex (supervillain archetype #4), your entire premise is shot to fuck and falls down on its arse.
So, tell me, why should we ignore the fact that Syndrome was a murdering lunatic? Would it have been more realistic if, after this guy murdered all their old friends, tried to kill them and set off to destroy a goodly chunk of city, that the Incredibles thought to themselves “gee, well, I guess he’s got a point there, maybe people do need this guy to knock their buildings down so that they can be sold super-boots and get some kind of technologically advanced equality”? Really? Is there some reason that one line of dialogue should outweigh everything else in the movie?