Ratatouille is one of those animated films that will make you emotional just for a rat that cooks and that is just the best way to know that of course it's going to be a good movie.
This story is about Remy, a rat, who has a very developed sense of smell and taste, and lives with his rat family in the countryside in France, All the other rats are happy to live on garbage and scraps, but not Remy, he is glad for good food, understands mixing flavors, dreams of real cooking, not survival eating, His whole family is a bit odd about his obsession over the quality of the food since he's literally a rat picking at the scraps lying on the ground, but Remy is inspired by a famous chef now deceased Auguste Gusteau, whose motto is anyone can cook, which becomes the entire life philosophy for Remy.
As a result of an outbreak, Remy's colony is split apart, leaving him without his family and he ends up in the sewers of Paris, and then eventually finds his way to Gusteau's actual restaurant, the one associated with his hero chef, It is there he encounters Alfredo Linguini, a hapless, bumbling young man who has just been hired to be the garbage collector, but has no real skill in culinary arts, and desperately wants to hold on to his job because it is the only thing he has left of his late mother, who he never really knew much about to begin with, One night, Linguini accidentally makes a mess of a soup and Remy, unable to just stand by and watch good food get wasted, secretly fixes it, that soup ends up being a surprise hit with customers, and just like that, an unlikely partnership is born.
What follows is the most creative gimmick in a family movie ever. It's so that Remy sneaks under Linguini's chef's hat and direct him like a puppet, pulls his hair in the kitchen, cooking up dishes Linguini never knew how to prepare, It sounds ridiculous on paper, and it kind of is, but somehow the movie sells it so well that you are fully invested instead of questioning the logistics too hard.
Things get complicated, of course, as Linguini begins to receive praise for Remy's real cooking abilities, as the restaurant is besieged by a very outspoken and extremely unappreciative food critic, Anton Ego, then there is the actual head chef of the restaurant, Skinner, who is suspicious from the get go, and has his own secret agenda about the restaurant's ownership.
The more the story unfolds, the bigger of a problem Remy has, he's torn between his rat family, who don't understand his love of cooking, and this human world, which, if they knew that there was a rat behind their good food, would probably reject him on the spot, Underneath all the comedy and kitchen chaos, that inner struggle makes the movie truly heartfelt.
By the time all this culminates in one very personal, memory inducing meal that's served right to the most demanding critic in Paris, the movie delivers this message so well that talent and passion can emerge from the most unlikely sources, and true talent never needs to be denied.
Genuinely one of Pixar's best, equal parts funny, heartfelt, and visually gorgeous, especially anything involving food.
Rating: 90/100
