what ratatouille taught me about loving film

archived from a deleted writing account.originally posted march 10th, 2021. minor edits to grammar and syntax made february 6th, 2025.

Since moving out of my lifelong city just after Christmas 2019, I find myself seeking solace in a long-time comfort: watching, talking about, and making movies. I often find myself, however, feeling inferior to my peers because I just like most movies. For a film to be bad, I have to be actively bored, lost, or uninterested in the plot. I find joy in everything from casting to coloring, from the minutiae of dialogue to costuming even for a modern day piece, the way the solitary fight scene in a movie is choreographed. And yet, though I seem to know why I like movies, I always fall back on this idea of ‘oh, well I’m not harsh to movies, so I must not get it.’ I convinced myself that I must be lesser than my film fanatic friends, just because I‘m delighted by most every movie I watch. I berated myself about this for a few days, coined ‘bad movie apologist’ as a brand, and then sat down in front of my laptop, stopped feeling sorry for enjoying things, and asked myself:

Why is every movie good to me, to some degree? Ratatouille has always been one of my favorite movies. I’m a fan of rats, I’m an amateur cook trying to figure out how to make my place in cuisine with minimal resources, and I’m a Pixar apologist through and through.

Resourceful and well coordinated, the rats grab bits of decomposing food and carry it off. REMY is among them, drearily going through garbage.

REMY (V.O.) — And secondly — I have a highly developed sense of taste and smell.

Suddenly he catches a SCENT; which leads him to uncover a nearly untouched piece of PASTRY, a discarded NAPOLEON.

REMY (sniffing Napoleon) — Flour, eggs, sugar, vanilla bean, small twist of lemon…

The Napoleon suddenly erupts, and out pops Remy’s pudgy brother EMILE, covered in cream and completely oblivious to the destruction he’s wrought.

EMILE — You can smell all that? Wow. You have a gift.

I don’t think all movies are inherently good. I think movies contain multitudes, content that will distress or offend one person and at the same time validate or acknowledge the traumas or experiences of another. Coco is a movie that deeply connects with a specific culture, and, while having a wide understanding even to people who don’t celebrate Día de los Muertos, isn’t free from the “shit film” label on the internet. Fight Club was widely debated upon release despite a now cult-like following, and I can name quite a few people who would draw and quarter you for insulting it. The Minions Movie is one I have found to be comedically polarizing by people who have watched it- it’s either merchandising bait or unexpectedly brilliant.

Movies aren’t going to win everyone.

But, in every movie, there’s a flavor combination. Some of us consume media as just that- consumption. The piece of work is shoved into one’s mouth and taken as fodder, and while this isn’t bad, some movies are perfect just as this. They remind me of Scorsese’s comparison of Marvel movies to theme parks- you can’t deny they’re fun, but they’re indulgent and not exactly akin to the arthouse vibes-driven plots of some movies. If you spend your whole life at Disneyland and do nothing else, you’re going to be broke (beyond that, likely in credit card debt), nauseous from funnel cake and loop-de-loop coasters, and your perspective on reality, other ways to have fun, and cinema are probably going to be skewed.

But some people take a Remy approach to movies. They taste the strawberries of cinematography, the cheese of minute character relationships, and a symphony is born. The more aspects of deliciousness, the brighter the song. Suddenly, you’re not consuming the individualities of dynamic dialogue, stark color choices, and allegories for political leaders, you’ve put a bite of each of these treats in your mouth at once and the flavors combine to create Daisies (1966), and you’re absolutely delighted by what you’ve consumed. If Věra Chytilová had switched out aspects of this movie or altered her vision even a bit, it would be a different flavor in one’s mouth, and perhaps not have been banned by the government!

Emile opens his eyes (surroundings reappear), looks at Remy.

EMILE — Oh, I’m detecting nuttiness.

When I first got defensive about bad movies, it centered around an unequivocally weak movie that I fell for head over heels- Mr. Right (2015). It centers around Anna Kendrick- a typical Kendrickian display of an awkward girl who can’t seem to get it right in her life. She’s clumsy, goofy, and seems to find herself mussing up many aspects of her life. Enter Sam Rockwell’s character, a morally ‘fixed’ assassin-for-hire who now kills the men who are insistent on hiring him for his endless talent of murder. The movie follows their relationship, Rockwell’s desire to conform to the expectations of a relationship and an ethical human despite Winter Soldier-adjacent brainwashing. With this, he discovers that he and his quirky partner don’t need to be normal, don’t need to meet expectations. They love each other’s differences and find their own bonds, joys, and ways of connecting without being ‘normal boyfriend and girlfriend.’ This is also the movie that made me find old Tim Roth hot!

It sucks. 2.8 average on letterboxd, 44% on the tomatometer, and a whopping 56% audience rating that really doesn’t make it worth the film calories. It’s bad. It feels like a student film that had a 600 page arthouse script and 6 days to cast, film, edit, and release, an hour and a half maximum runtime, had to be a comedy, and physically had to make Sam Rockwell a mildly more upstanding dude. (Coming after The Green Mile, Choke, and Don Verdean, among others, Sam Rockwell can always do with a movie where he’s at least working on being an upstanding guy.)

As you can probably tell by the essay I wrote on the plot alone, I like this movie. I can acknowledge its failings, but I like it. Returning to one of my favorite sequences in Ratatouille, let’s dive a little deeper into cuisine. Remy’s first combo is a strawberry and cheese. How do we see these prepared in cuisine? Strawberry cheesecake. Crowd pleaser, right? Tangy, sweet, it’s a dessert. A winner.

According to the source of all vitriol, reddit, from a now-deleted user on r/unpopularopinions-

“I don’t want fucking CHEESE in my fucking CAKE. And I certainly wouldn’t want cake in a cheesy dish either. Also cream cheese icing is fucking disgusting as well. Keep the cake and the cheese separate. They don’t mix. I would rather eat fucking mushrooms in a brownie before I would want to eat cheese in or on a cake.”

When looking into pairings, there are also appetizers and cocktail snacks. Strawberry, Chimay Doré cheese, and bell pepper. Or, switch the cheese for Chavroux and the pepper for basil. These may seem gross to some palates- they’re to be paired with wines or cocktails, and could perhaps alienate certain tastes.

REMY — And what are you eating??

Emile stares at Remy, chewing. He looks down, pondering the unrecognizable wad in his hands for a long beat. He FROWNS.

EMILE — I don’t really know. I think it was some sort of wrapper once.

REMY — What — ? No.

Remy grabs the wad and throws it away with a flourish.

Emile likes trash. Emile doesn’t deny the joys of gourmet food, but he’s happy with trash. That’s the rats’ mantra, that’s how Remy gets a job in the colony- they just don’t want it to be poisoned. Django (Remy’s dad who does, it turns out, have a name) even accuses him of a ‘surplus of snobbery.’ Trash food has its place in a rat colony; there are a lot of them and one’s consumption is based on a lack of food and an excess of mouths to feed. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to the people eating it, that doesn’t mean there aren’t diverse flavor combinations to find, it just means it’s readily available. Rats have a keen eye for something specific- consuming garbage and making the most of it.

I have always felt inferior as a cook because of what I do not have access to. I do not have a kitchenaid, I cannot grind my own beef, I cannot even cook a meal for 3 hours every night due to my own functioning. I try to make the best burger I can with the cheapest pounds of ground beef. My splurges are on a small quantity of fresh mozzarella for homemade pizza, and many of my meals are as simple as a couple quesadillas made with the big pack of corn tortillas and a pack of shredded cheese that was on sale. But my roommate loves when I cook for her. She sings the praises of every dish I make for our shared dinners. Someone seems to enjoy my cooking, does this make me a good chef? Even without a Michelin-Star restaurant, ingredients, and staff backing me up?

Anyone can cook. Anyone. A mushroom grilled over lightning means the world to a rat, when a chef would likely notice the acridness of the lightning, an inability to wash garden ingredients, perhaps even say Andante would pair better than Tomme de Chevre de Pays.

But to Remy, it’s delicious. To the taste buds he’s trying to please, the fruity, nutty notes perfectly blend with the earthiness of the mushroom at hand. It melted how he needed, and created a mushroom snack that made me, a known ’shroom hater, kinda crave it.

Remy is not Linguini. Remy is not Anton Ego. Remy, despite his imagination, is not Auguste Gusteau. He is a character with his own tastes and goals and palates. This is how I view movies.

Mr. Right is not what any chef-de-filme would fall for. I would never recommend it to everyone. It’s a cilantro movie- not everyone has the palate for it. Does that make it any less valid? No! Some people omit cilantro from every dish without fail, some people can’t bear a dish without it. This comes from our taste buds, what we put it in, our cultures, our experiences with the food. Not everyone falls in love with the story, the characters, the cinematography, of any movie. But where some of us are lost, others feel validated- others of us feel the moral dilemmas of life and love, or feel bogged down by our past relationships in ways that hold us back from the wacky, wild world of loving the person we were destined to love.

And it isn’t all about the characterization. Some people can feel no emotional connection to a movie and feel obligated to rate it highly because of other flavor notes. I can’t honestly say the romance of La La Land hit perfectly for me, but the choreography, the songs, the shot selection to define the nuances of romance- they’re all so masterfully organized, it’s (in my mind) an undeniably well-made film. And even if I don’t connect to it, how can I deny my partner, the love of my life, their own independent truth of longing and loss that they connect to the love between the protagonists? I cannot taste the flavors they do, but I cannot invalidate that palate because I don’t have the frame of reference in my taste buds to just say ‘you’re wrong.’

EMILE — I’m hungry. And I don’t need the inside food to be happy. The key, my friend, is to not be picky. Observe…

I find it immensely difficult to find an unequivocally bad movie. Do I dislike some movies? Yes. Are they bad? Not without any argument. Every person on earth is experiencing life a little differently, and everyone will find comfort in a different character or experience or voice or aspect on screen. There are people who review movies largely on a technical merit- nothing bad can be said about this, we need people who can analyze and understand shot choices and editing and scoring and casting. I, and others, review movies primarily on emotional merits- an undeniable analysis as well, because how can we deny the individual experiences and beauty one finds in visibility of experience on-screen? Movies are a labor of love no matter who makes them, because an immeasurable quantity of people are putting their writing, rewriting, camera work, compositions, acting skills, editing-every aspect of a movie requires one if not more people working- and perhaps this is even more beautiful when done with a minimal team still outputting a meaningful product.

EGO (V.O.) — In many ways the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgement. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.

[…]

EGO (V.O.) — But, the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things… the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something… and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.

The critic in Ratatouille is named for the antagonist of this Pixar fairytale- Ego. Critics and reviewers are most privy to this, because we feel as a viewer we have a higher ground, the lack of emotional connection to creating a piece ourselves to analyze it more effectively. Ego is perhaps the epitome of why we write about film- a sort of ‘look at me! I get it the most!’ when talking about art. Ego is right, it’s fun to see how people can be mean to movies. The core of comedy is analysis and often criticism of a subject, and when consuming reviews, we want to be entertained. We can take an outside perspective without needing to think of what a film meant to the creators, and work based on our own experience. But there is a beauty in loving art, a talent in appreciating what seems un-appreciate-able. Even if you cannot relate to the experience, I think a unique skill is being able to look outside the obvious of a movie and love anything that’s loveable about it. ‘I didn’t get it’ does not make a bad movie, someone got it. ‘The coloring was too bright’ does not make a bad movie, someone might have seen meaning or thought put into the choice. ‘The camera was shaky’ didn’t stop the found footage horror genre from dominating! Ego is perhaps helpful in having the guts to review movies at all, but ego is also what stops us from acknowledging the beauty of how many people are experiencing the same 2 hours differently. Experiencing art is deeply personal, so why are we treating movies like universally accepted truths instead of individual art pieces being loved and hated by individual viewers? I do not think I am the greatest reviewer of all time, or above anyone who takes to movies harshly, but I think perhaps Ratatouille has taught me a new lesson on what seems to be my millionth rewatch in life.

Not only can anyone cook, make movies, draw, paint, make art- but anyone can find beauty in what you’ve chosen to create.