"Inside Out" provides a language for therapy

Melena Ryzik, How ‘Inside Out’ and Its Sequel Changed Therapy, NYTimes, Aug. 7, 2024. Opening paragraphs of the article:

In 2012, when Olivia Carter was just starting out as a school counselor, she employed all sorts of strategies to help her elementary-age students understand and communicate their feelings — drawing, charades, color association, role playing. After 2015, though, starting those conversations became a lot easier, she said. It took just one question: “Who has seen the movie ‘Inside Out’?”

That Pixar hit, about core emotions like joy and sadness, and this summer’s blockbuster sequel, which focuses on anxiety, have been embraced by educators, counselors, therapists and caregivers as an unparalleled tool to help people understand themselves. The story of the moods steering the “control panel” in the head of a girl named Riley has been transformational, many experts said, in day-to-day treatment, in schools and even at home, where the films have given parents a new perspective on how to manage the turmoil of growing up.

“As therapeutic practice, it has become a go-to,” said David A. Langer, president of the American Board of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. In his household, too: “I have 9-year-old twins — we speak about it regularly,” said Langer, who’s also a professor of psychology at Suffolk University. “Inside Out” finger puppets were in frequent rotation when his children were younger, a playful way to examine the family dynamic. “The art of ‘Inside Out’ is explicitly helping us understand our internal worlds,” Langer said.

And it’s not just schoolchildren that it applies to. “I’ve been stealing lines from the movie and quoting them to adults, not telling them that I’m quoting,” said Regine Galanti, a psychologist and author in private practice on Long Island, speaking of the new film.

Anxiety:

And the new movie’s focus on anxiety, which has reached crisis proportions among adolescents, normalizes experiences that for young people could seem isolating or overwhelming, and makes them relatable.

“Almost every day there’s a student who’s struggling or having a panic attack,” Carter said. “I could see this being something that I lean on pretty heavily for a long time.”

Later:

“INSIDE OUT” ARRIVED at a moment when educators and caregivers were paying more attention to what’s known as social-emotional learning, prioritizing connection and communication skills, and recognizing, not tamping down, children’s sensibilities as part of their self-regulation. [...]

Acknowledging feelings “is like a magical thing,” Damour said. “If a person says, ‘I feel sad,’ they suddenly feel less sad.”

That “Inside Out” helps families have those conversations together amplifies one of its messages, to embrace our personalities in all their shades and shadows.

There's much more at the link.

Michael Barrier and Andrew Osmond on Inside Out

Michael Barrier:

Still, I couldn't get past the film's governing conceit, that the personified emotions inside eleven-year-old Riley's head were somehow distinct from Riley herself. Who, or what, is Riley, if the emotions governing her life are not central to her being? To descend to a lower metaphysical plane, or maybe just call the story's craftsmanship into question, it seems to me that Inside Out's personified emotions, to be credible as such, would have to be one-dimensional—that is, nothing but fearful or angry or whatever—whereas most of them are not. Joy is so much more than joyful, especially as voiced by Amy Poehler, that she's really the story's protagonist, with a much broader emotional range than Riley herself. The girl is little more than a puppet, a sort of latterday Pinocchio, perhaps, if I might invoke another problematic Disney feature.

Andrew Osmond:

This child, Riley, is portrayed unusually for a Hollywood cartoon, but much less so for anime. Inside Out is about the end of her childhood, her moving towards adolescence, and the uncertainty and anger she feels. To make this less abstract, the script ties this in with Riley’s parents moving from Minnesota to San Francisco (Pixar’s real-life home); Riley’s troubles fitting in; and her realisation that a treasured part of her life is over and gone forever. In her head, this plays through the shifting relationship between Riley’s main emotions, Joy and Sadness.

Anime is different; it prefers to depict troubled kids at their own level. For many fans, anime is practically defined by angsty, angry teenage boys. In Akira, Tetsuo’s incontinent mental and physical changes were animated as a monster in an Olympic stadium. He was followed by Shinji in Evangelion, Light in Death Note, Eren in Attack on Titan and many more. The boy Ame in Wolf Children is interesting; he’s the reverse of Riley, sad in childhood, only finding joy as he grows up, though he still breaks his mother’s heart.

But closer to Riley, there are girls like Chihiro in Spirited Away, Momo in A Letter to Momo and Anna in Ghibli’s upcoming When Marnie was There. As I discuss elsewhere on this blog, these three girls – all about Riley’s age – share an animation director, Masashi Ando, who specialises in “murky, painful” emotions. Chihiro, Momo and Anna also spend much of their respective films being unhappy, more than a Hollywood toon could allow. Inside Out sidesteps the problem by telling most of its story through the aggressively cheerful Joy, not the increasingly mopey Riley.

There's much more there, including a mention of Cranium Command, a now defunct attraction from Walt Disney World, which depicted the inside of a boy's mind and included animation by a young Pete Docter.

Last, a comment I sent to Barrier:

What I'm wondering is why this film got such extreme praise as it it. I understand there's something of a "Pixar can do no wrong" vibe in some quarters, but the notion that this presages a new era in animation, animation directed at adults no less, seems extreme even for that. Something else is going on, though I don't quite know what.

Maybe it's that the film's main 'bug' has been misconstrued as a 'feature'. This is because Riley's inner gnomes outclass Riley herself thereby forcing you to do a bit of thinking to keep things together. That thinking is being reconceived as adultness rather than as an aesthetic flaw.

Earlier posts about Inside Out:

• Pixar’s Inside Out is Confused, Alas, But who Knows what the Future May Bring
• Inside Out: I don't get it

PIxar's WALL-E, an old review

Looking back through the archives I discovered this review of Pixar's WALL-E that I'd published in The Valve back on June 29, 2008. Given that I've just reviewed Pixar's latest, Inside Out, I thought I'd republish it here. For one thing, it has some remarks about how my opinion of a film is influenced by the opinions of others. I've also included some "extras".

I went to see WALL-E on Friday. It’s Pixar’s latest film and, as someone with a particular interest in animation, I had to see it. I’d seen trailers last year and read chit-chat on the web. Late last week I read some of the early reviews, in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, Ebert, and one or two others (Metacritic links them all). So I was primed.

This has been my standard practice for years. I also read reviews afterward, more so than ahead of time. And I talk with people about a film.

The point is that my movie-watching takes place in the context of other peoples’ observations and reactions, and that those opinions and reactions affect me.

Did I like WALL-E? Yes. No surprise there. But I’m still mulling things over, still trying to understand my experience of the film. Sure, it’s my experience, but that doesn’t mean that I understand that experience. Things aren’t so simple.

The big hype going in was that there’s no dialog during the first third to a half of the film. No dialog?! Just two robots scurrying around on an earth bereft of humans but piled high with the scrap they left behind. WALL-E’s been doing some of that piling. The other robot, EVE, is visiting earth on a mission. WALL-E sees her and falls in love. Boy meets girl. A classic.

But no dialog. I didn’t get all the pre-release chatter on this point. Sure, it’s not the standard thing, but I didn’t see why it couldn’t work, and work as commercial fare. It worked – the reviews and post-release chatter confirms it.

The dialog starts when WALL-E and EVE get back to one of the giant space craft where all the humans are, now bloated and floating around on hover chairs. The action picks up – conflict and chase scenes. My interest flagged a bit, and something about those humans bothered me.

Reading comments at Cartoon Brew helped me think about those things. The Brew is devoted to animation. The people who post and comment there are knowledgeable and passionate. Many of them work in the animation industry. As I said, their comments helped me think about my own reactions. But let me quote one of them, Chris Berdoz:

So I finally saw it on opening day, and afterwards I thought “that was okay”. I felt it didn’t live up to my expectations, perhaps only about 80% or so. I still felt like the Incredibles was my favorite CG movie of all time. But as I got home I couldn’t get the film off my mind. I started thinking about the message behind the movie. I started thinking about parts of the movie. The more I thought about it the more it settled in that the movie really did live up to my expectations. It was kind of a delayed reaction, I guess. Then I really wanted to watch it again. I decided I’d buy the DVD when it came out, which is pretty major because I never buy DVDs unless I seriously love a movie. And then I started reading people’s interpretations of the film and that got even more excited.

He too had to think about the film, and he too was affected by comments he’d read after seeing the film.

Inside Out: I don't get it

I saw Pixar's Inside Out as soon as it opened. Why? Because I love animation, I think highly of Pixar at its best, and the film was getting mad hype. I was under-whelmed. The film seemed confused and unfocused. So I went to see it again a week later, and it got better. Maybe I over-reacted the first time. Also, I saw it in 3D this time, but I don't think that had much to do with it. The story's the story regardless of 2D or 3D.

Still, I keep hearing that this is an apocalyptic sea-change in cinematic experience. David Edelstein, for example, opens his review like this:

A little over five years ago, Pixar writer-director Pete Docter (Up) tried to imagine how the world looked through the eyes of his sad 11-year-old daughter, and the movie he was moved to conceive, Inside Out, will likely help sad girls and boys and the grown-ups they become for as long as there are movies. Set largely inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley, this teeming, tear-duct-draining, exhaustingly inventive, surreal animated comedy is going to be a new pop-culture touchstone. In all kinds of ways it’s a mind-opener.

Really? "Exhaustingly inventive"?  Inventive, yes, but not that inventive, not exhaustingly, or exuberantly, or everlastingly, nor even extremely-to-the-max-with-sprinkles inventive. A "pop-culture touchstone"?A touchstone of just what exactly? A "mind-opener"?

Disney's Fantasia was all those things, though that wasn't recognized at the time. It took decades for that film to break-even on its investment. The film had to create its own audience through patient repetition. Disney showed its segments on his TV show, a schools showed the Rites of Spring sequence at morning assemblies: I remember it myself from my grade-school years in the 50s. In a way, the fact that people didn't get it when it came out is a sign of how inventive it really was.

 Inside Out is no Fantasia. What seems to grab people is the basic conceit – the personification of motives within a person's mind and shifting the burden of action to their interaction. That's what's seen as revelatory; Edelstein again:

Having been sucked up a chute and propelled to the far end of Riley’s mindscape, the fundamentally at-odds Joy and Sadness must find their way back to headquarters before everything really goes to hell. The road is anything but straight. The obstacles are riotous. Docter and his Pixar team have packed the film with gags — visual, verbal, broad, glancing — and I can’t think of one that doesn’t have psychological, philosophical, cultural, or just fascinating architectural underpinnings. The Long Term Memory facility was apparently inspired by a Jelly Belly candy factory and an egg-processing plant, and what its unromantic custodians choose to purge and what to keep shall not be revealed here. Dreams are scripted and shot in a mini Hollywood studio (not called DreamWorks, alas) near the giddy, freewheeling Imagination Land and the Sub­conscious, where dreams go to become nightmares. The most surprising encounter is with a friendly, dopey clown called Bing Bong (Richard Kind), who was once Riley’s imaginary friend. Happy as he is, Bing Bong carries a trace of the melancholy of Toy Story’s toys. He was once a major part of Riley’s inner world and loves her still. But he has no place in the mind of an evolving 11-year-old.

Well, yes, interesting and inventive. But it's an old ploy, not used much these days, but still, old. Maybe people just aren't used to thinking about the mind and Inside Out allows them to do it without, you know, thinking. 

Pixar’s Inside Out is Confused, Alas, But who Knows what the Future May Bring

A new Pixar film is an event, like it or not. Some are better (e.g. Ratatouille) than others. Advance word suggested Inside Out was one of the better ones, the best in the past few years. Alas, I fear it’s no more than middling Pixar, though there’s promise here.

The plot is simple: Family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. Young daughter, Riley, age 11, is upset – where are my friends! – depressed, and tries to run away. But doesn’t. The end.

Common enough. But hardly the stuff of a feature-length film. There is, however, more to Inside Out than the bare bones story. The conceit of this film is an old convention, sometimes known as psychomachia, in which a person’s mind is allegorized as the interaction between competing agents. You’ve seen it in cartoons before – a devil will appear over one shoulder of a character and an angel over the other shoulder. Pinocchio’s conscience, Jiminy Cricket, and Dumbo’s friend and motivational coach, Timothy Mouse, are in this tradition. So is Remy’s Gasteau from Ratatouille, which I’ve discussed in Psychomachia Modern, with a Digression into Shakespeare.

So, most of Inside Out’s action takes place in Riley’s mind, which is peopled with Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Anger, and Bing-Bong, an imaginary friend from childhood. Each is characterized by a different dominant color and a different shape. While Fear, Anger, and Disgust remain at the control center of Riley’s mind, Joy and Sadness go on a journey into the unconscious to retrieve a lost memory. In this they’re helped by Bing-Bong, who leads them in an effort to recover an imaginary rocket-wagon. There’s danger, of course; they get lost and get into trouble. But things work out in the end.

On the one hand, this is wonderful. This is what animation is for, to go where live action cannot go. Pixar takes advantage of the freedom animation affords and steps away from the annoying photorealism all too common in CGI animation as it has evolved. We need more of this, lots more.

But it doesn’t quite work – though I note that when I saw the film the audience did break out in applause at the end. One problem is that the merely mental characters, the agents of Riley’s mind – Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger – seemed too much like “real” characters. They seem to have motivations and desires of their own and each seemed richer and more inherently diverse than implied by the one-dimensionality of their assignments in Riley’s mind. Because the drama of these inner agents gets more screen time than Riley herself, she almost gets lost and becomes a one-dimensional puppet to a handful of bickering masters, each as interesting and compelling as she is.

Frog Up Ponyo Sita: Complacency vs. Vision

An old post in which I talk about Disney (The Princess and the Frog), Pixar (Up), Hayao Miyazaki (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea), and Nina Paley (Sits Sings the Blues). Disney isn't what it was in the old days, Pixar may be cresting the hill and looking a the down slope, but Miyazaki is still going strong and Nina Paley, who knows what she'll do next.

Walt Disney’s company created the first feature-length animated film and was, for a long-time, the most distinguished producer of such films. Pixar, now owned by Disney, is the most important producer of animated features made though 3D computer graphics, techniques Pixar pioneered. Hayao Miyazaki is arguably the most important Japanese filmmaker currently working in feature-length animation and Nina Paley is, well, her blog tags her as “America’s best-loved unknown cartoonist.” The purpose of this post is to examine and assess four films by each of these, respectively, The Princess and the Frog, Up, Ponyo on the Cliff, and Sita Sings the Blues. The first two are wonderful technical achievements, but only so-so as stories. The last two are just wonderful.

Disney’s The Princess and the Frog was better than its trailers led me to believe it would be, but it is hardly the sign of a renaissance of traditional hand-drawn animation it was touted to be. A combination of action and musical numbers, it continues the approach to feature-length animation Disney has been exploring since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Some of the musical numbers are wonderful – I’m particularly fond the psychedelic voodoo imagery of “Friends on the Other Side” and the clouds of glass bottles at the end of Mama Odie’s “Dig a Little Deeper” – and Louis, the trumpet-playing alligator, was a clever delight. But the story, not so much.

The story conflates a standard-issue frogboy-meets-girl fairy tale with a plea for the virtue of hard thankless work, as opposed to, say, magical hokum, unless it’s good magical hokum to counteract bad magical hokum. Bad magical hokum is purveyed by long tall city-living males dressed in black while good magical hokum is purveyed by short swamp-dwelling earth mamas dressed in white. To add a bit of tension to this already tenuous plot we throw in some frog-loving back woods bumpkins. They’re foiled by a good-ole boy Cajun firefly, who turns out to be the real hero of the film. All of which is to say, there’s a lotta’ stuff been thrown into the story, but it’s not clear why it’s all needed.

What about race? This was to be the Walt Disney film that deals with race. And, yes, Tiana and Naveen are black, which is to say, they have brown skin. And that’s all that being black means in this film, set in early 20th Century New Orleans. One might well say: So what? And, if Disney hadn’t made such a big deal of race in touting the film, that’s what I’d say. I know race is more than complexion, but one needn’t do EVERYTHING in a film. Disney chose to make race an issue, however, so their failure to come to terms what race as a social fact, rather than as a cosmetic fact, suggests a fundamental lack of seriousness about the story they’re telling. In the end it’s just one more story about a princess and her party dress.

Pixar’s Up is often gorgeous and occasionally poignant, but it is confused about what film it wants to be. Yes, the ten-minute recap of Carl and Ellie’s life together is touching; but that’s well within the range of any competent film-maker. And, yes, I too shed a tear when Carl gave Russell his merit badge at the end of the film. But those moments certainly don’t lift the film out of the ordinary, and that’s what Up is, an ordinary film, albeit one made though extraordinary technical means. It rode its technical virtuosity to the Oscars, but that hardly compensates for a diffuse and confused story.

That opening recap is done in highly stylized, but realistic terms. And so it is with Carl's conflict with the construction workers and their all-but faceless boss. It's all highly stylized, but within the imaginable capabilities of an old man living in our world. It isn't until the house actually lifts off that we realize we're not in Dorothy's Kansas anymore, no we're not. Still, this isn't much more than a plausible exaggeration. But, at some point the exaggeration ceases being plausible. At some point a carefully constructed world gave way to a disconnected set of gags. And the gags weren't in support of any particular premise. They're just gags – the talking dogs, Alpha with the high squeaky voice, and so forth – and those gags and stunts and obliterate the serious underpinnings of this story: Carl’s loss of Ellie, Russell’s estrangement from his father.

Visualizing the Mind in Three Cartoons

It’s time for a visit home, by which I mean it’s time to get back to serious business, blogging about animation.

I want to return to territory I poked into in Toccata Redux: Visualizing Mental Objects, where I looked at some imagery in Toccata and Fugue in D Minor from Fantasia and from Ratatouille. The imagery had to do with visualizing mental processes. I want to add a third film into that mix, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence.

There’s a sense in which all of Fantasia is about visualizing the mind, for that’s the frame premise: The boyz (and girrls) in the orchestra are going to play some music while you construct visual images to go along. Except that Uncle Walt’s going to help you by putting the imagery up there on the screen. But that frame is only really active for the first episode, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and that because the imagery is strange, semi-abstract and so resists being identified is this or that specific thing or action.

And so we see things like this:

Since they don’t look much like 3D objects in a 3D world it’s easy enough to take them as mental objects, things of the mind, not of an external world, if only by default.

Ratatouille 4: Psychomachia Modern, with a Digression into Shakespeare

Let’s start with a definition. The best one I found is in the Muppet Wiki:

Psychomachia is a literary concept named for a Latin poem by Prudentius. The poem dealt with the inner conflict within one's soul, between virtue and vice, through allegorical representations. This concept of an inner struggle became key to the developing Christian religion, and was refined dramatically in the medieval morality plays. Works such as Everyman, Piers Plowman, and Faust featured protagonists struggling with temptation, literally personified through the seven deadly sins (gluttony, lust, et. al). A variation of this involved the use of a "Good Angel" and "Evil Angel," one to encourage the tormented soul and the other to push the protagonist further along the path to ruination.

This eventually developed into the popular comedy cliche wherein a character has an angel on or above his shoulder, literally, and a devil.

In the Disney canon both Jiminy Cricket and Timothy Mouse are in this tradition. They are companions to the protagonist who help guide him in his quest for maturity. Jiminy Cricket is quite obviously Pinocchio’s moral minder; Timothy Mouse’s job is more about Dumbo’s morale than his morals.

In Ratatouille Gusteau provides both functions for Remy. He provides moral guidance—don’t be a thief—and he provides moral support. Gusteau first appears to Remy when he’s lost in the sewer. Remy’s leafing through the cookbook and an image of Gusteau comes up off the page and addresses him:

Later, when he’s running through the attics of Paris, Gusteau materializes out of the air:

Toccata Redux: Visualizing Mental Objects

What’s this

? and this

? and this

?

In all cases, of course, one may properly answer: a frame from the first episode of Fantasia: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. But that’s not quite what I meant. I KNOW they’re frames from Fantasia. But what do they represent? Or are they just meaningless abstractions?

Ratatouille 3: Mommy ex Machina

And another thing.

In watching Ratatouille this time around, after I’d just been through a major examination of Dumbo, I was struck by how Bird staged Ego’s reaction to the ratatouille served up at the climax of the film. He  has Ego regress to his childhood.

Why?

Well, the film itself gives us a reason for that; his beloved mother had fed him ratatouille when he was but a boy.

But why’d Bird do that? All he needed to do in order to get his happy ending was to have Ego like the dish. Why the regression?

I’m suggesting that there’s a dramatic reason for the regression, but one that doesn’t follow directly from the story. Bird wants to invoke sentimentality about idyllic childhood moments. Whether he really needs to do so is another matter. That he does so is obvious. Note that the moment is elaborately staged, an indication that Bird REALLY REALLY meant it.

Here we see Ego putting a bite into his mouth:

Food in mouth, got it.

Of course, food goes in the mouth. Everyone knows that. But the close-up forces us to attend to that ordinary event, to note it and think about it. And, we all know that in psychoanalytic thinking orality is associated with mother, through her breast, the infant’s source of food. And that’s where Bird is taking us—well, to mommy, though not to her breast (this is, after all, a family film)—and with spectacular visual effects.

Ratatouille 2: Fordist Artistes in the Kitchen

Sure, I left out a lot of things out of my first note on the film, deliberately. After all, it was only a quick note. Still, within two or three minutes after I put the DVD on I realized that I’d missed a thing or two within the even the limited scope I set for that post. And then I watched the whole thing.

Some Points of Interest

Here’s some things I picked up, with brief comments. These are some of the features I’d give attention to if I were to undertake a fuller analysis, which I may do some day. But not now.

Imaginary Gusteau: Remy is guided by a hallucinated Gusteau, the legendary chef who believes: “Anyone can cook.” So, Linguini, the bumbling garbage boy, who is Gusteau’s illegitimate son, is guided by Remy, the rat. Remy is guided by Gusteau (imaginary). We’ve got a triple-decker vs. the double-deckers of Dumbo and Pinocchio: Dumbo and Timothy Mouse; Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket.

Stealing: Remy worries about being a thief. It’s a motif in his conversations with his brother and his father. It comes up early in the film and gets repeated. Later, when Collette tells Remy the backgrounds of the kitchen staff we learn that they have shady pasts.

Poison Checker: Once Dad discovered Remy’s sensitive nose, he made him poison-checker with the clan. That is, Remy was given a Fordist gig, and it’s depicted that way in the film. More on Fordism later.

Inner Workings: Not only does Remy control Linguini’s actions, but they have to work out a system of communication for doing it. This is very different from Dumbo and Pinocchio, where Timothy Mouse and Jiminy Cricket simply talk to their charges. No special mechanisms needed or revealed. So, we get to see the inner workings of this communication system, but also the inner workings of the kitchen.

Family vs. Calling: Inner conflict for Remy, family (the colony) vs. vocation (calling). But none for Linguini. He may be a bumbler, but he’s not really conflicted about his position in the world. Remy is. Neither Timothy Mouse nor Jiminy Cricket are conflicted. But in the crunch, the rat colony helped save the day. Dad recognized that cooking was important to Remy and so offered to help. Dad to Remy: “We’re not cooks, but we are family. Tell us what to do, and we’ll get it done.” By sets up a production system in the kitchen with the rats doing the work and Remy supervising.

Concluding Montage: A point about story craft: In Dumbo, a newsreel leads to the end of the film. In Ratatouille, Ego’s review, read over a montage, leads to the end. That is, both films lead to an emotional climax that, alas, leaves plot threads dangling. Emotionally, there’s no need to do anything but wrap things up. Both films do that quickly. What other films/stories are like this? Do they have anything in common other than this device?

Ratatouille, a Quick Note on Man, Vermin and Food

This recent blogging about animals and animation has made me think of Pixar’s Ratatouille, which mostly takes place in a city, Paris, and sometimes in the sewers. It is not, of course, a feature from the Golden Age. Rather, it is quite recent, 2007, and in CGI. Alas, I don’t have time to give it a full treatment. This brief note will have to do for now.

Let’s start with a passage from Lois Rostow Kuznets, When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development (1994). We’re late in the book, with a discussion of the relations of man and beast in Western thought (p. 140):

The gap between man and beast has not gone unquestioned. In The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century (1933), George Boas describes a challenge to this way of thinking [man over beast] in the form of primitivism. According to Boas, the French primitivists were men who not only “looked to their pre-civilized fellows as exemplars of human conduct,” but who sometimes “turned their admiring glances below man and found the true models in the animals” (1). He calls this philosophy “theriophily,” and notes that in this line of thinking “natural” is always superior to civilized (which becomes regarded as overcivilized and effete).

So, in Ratatouille our protagonist is not only an animal, but a rat, named Remy. Rats are vermin. They’re not pets, like cats, dogs, or parakeets; nor work animals, like horses or some breeds of dogs; nor are they game animals, like squirrel or deer; nor fur animals, like beaver, raccoon, or mink. They eat anything, including trash—THAT, I suspect, is why they’re classed as vermin (here we should dip into the anthropological literature on taboo, but I’ve not the time). We hunt them to rid ourselves of them, but we don’t eat their flesh nor wear their pelts.

Remy, however, is no ordinary rat. He’s a gourmet, and he’s learned to cook by stealing glances at a TV cooking show hosted by the great Gusteau, whose motto “Anyone can cook” gets stretched to include at least one rat, Remy. So, a creature culturally classified as a trash-eater is cast as a superior chef.