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Ratatouille

Pixar studios has no one to blame but itself. Its films Toy Story , Finding Nemo , and The Incredibles have raised the bar so high, for what's possible in a computer animated film, that it's well-nigh impossible for a new movie to clear it. Ratatouille , Pixar's latest, would probably seem remarkable were it made by anyone else. But when Pixar plays it safe, it's a letdown.

Ratatouille is the story of Remy, a rat gourmand who dreams of becoming a great chef; and Linguine, his human friend, a clumsy kitchen garbage boy who dreams of at least holding down a job for a change. That premise would seem a good fit for screenwriter/director Brad Bird's favorite theme, worked out in movies like The Incredibles and The Iron Giant : that genius must be protected from the tyranny of mediocrity.

But Ratatouille doesn't have the spark of Bird's passion projects, where one scene touches off the next like string of firecrackers. The concept for the film - an idea so good, it might have been made into a Newberry Award-winning children's book - isn't Bird's. It belongs to Jan Pinkava, the animator of a previous Pixar short called Geri's Game .

Pixar has, in the past, been wonderful about letting up-and-coming directors have their shot at the big time. Andrew Stanton, for example, got the green light to direct his first feature, Finding Nemo , based on the imagination and completeness of his storyboards. Bird has said that Pinkava couldn't get the story into shape. It's more likely that this time, Pixar declined to take a risk. So the script, credited to Bird but likely crafted by committee, is a cookie-cutter widget from Screenplay 101.

There's another foundational problem. An animated film lives or dies by the quality of its voice actors. It's impossible to imagine Toy Story without Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, Nemo without Albert Brooks, or The Incredibles without Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter. But the lead voices in Ratatouille are painfully off-key. Remy is voiced by comedian Patton Oswalt, Linguine by Lou Romano. Both make the mistake of trying to sound funny. It works better when the actor plays it straight, and the animation does the exaggerating. Witness how much more believable are Peter O'Toole and Jeanine Garofalo, as the cadaverous and feared food critic Anton Ego and black-haired, cute-as-a-button chef Collette.

The miscalculation of Remy's voice comes clear in the scenes where he doesn't speak at all, but must communicate with Linguine strictly through body language. There's poetry in those moments. And there's poetry sprinkled about elsewhere. In two sequences, we actually see what Remy tastes and smells, in a fanciful synesthesia of color and movement. The visual design of Paris and its four star kitchens is without parallel in animation: the sumptuous sheen on a copper pot, the eye-opening wooden texture of a vial of saffron. And who else but Pixar would make sure, in a scene where a kitchen cart is being pushed, that one of the wheels has a little wiggle?

There's a love story here, a villain, a mistaken identity intrigue, a whole extended family of rats to juggle, and too much ho-hum running and dodging. The emotional center - a boy and his rat - gets awfully diluted. And since we're asking, if you must retain the love story, why not take Cyrano one step further, and have Remy puppeteer Linguine through his first amorous fumblings?

That's a lot of shoulda-beens and coulda-beens for a movie that still beggars most of what's foisted on us as family entertainment. But with Pixar, you should always ask for the moon - because sometimes, you'll get it.

Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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