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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

Cinderella had a male lead? Was it one of the mice? What about the Little Mermaid? Snow White? Pocahontas? Mulan?

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.

“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.

Enjoy your yoga class — I skipped out last night for aikido. Where the hell are our priorities?