Ratatouille and The Hundred-Foot Journey Briefly Compared

I went to see The Hundred-Foot Journey the other day and was struck at how much it resembles Ratatouille, which, though a (mere) cartoon, is a better film. Both films center on food and on the art of cooking. Both involve the intersection of two social worlds, the French and the Indians in Hundred-Foot and humans and rats in Ratatouille. Yes, in Ratatouille the humans are also French, but the world of that film is French, so the contrast is between humans and animals, that is, rats. Whereas Hundred-Foot starts in Mumbai and then moves to France, thus establishing the contrast as being between two groups of ethnically and nationally different humans.

The crucial point, it seems to me, is that the protagonist is a male from the outsider group and he falls in love with, and wins, a female from the insider group. The outsider male is a better cook than the insider female he wins. This female helps him out. Because the protagonist in Ratatouille is in fact a rat, we have to have the elaborate business whereby Remy is fronted by a human, Linguini.

It is Remy’s frontman who falls in love with the woman, Collette, just as the Indian chef, Hassan Kadam, falls in love with the woman, Maguerite. When that happen, Colette learns that it is not Linguini who is the superior cook; it is Remy the rat. So in this case the woman is marrying her inferior, with Remy being superior to both in cooking.

This table lays out some of the parallels in how the films are set up:

	Ratatouille	Hundred-Foot Journey
Protogonist	Remy/Linguini	Hassan Kadam?
Love Interest	Colette, a cook in Skinner’s kitchen	Marguerite, a sous chef in Madam Mallory’s kitchen
Insiders	People	French
Outsiders	Rats	Indians
Dead eminence	Gasteau	Madam Mallory’s husband
Gastronomic Threat	Skinner’s frozen food ala Gasteau	molecular gastronomy

There are more parallels, but they’d require a bit of comparative discussion, which is more than I want to do. Two points: 1) In both films the moment of triumph comes with a meal prepared by the protagonist, a male chef from the outsider group, for the presiding genius of the insider group. In Ratatouille that genius is a critic, Anton Ego; in Hundred-Foot that genius is Madam Mallory, who is not herself a chef; and so she plays the role of critic in her kitchen. 2) The climax comes at a meal prepared by the protagonist for the critic. The moment of triumph is signaled by the same gesture of gustatory satisfaction on the part of both critics.

The parallels are really quite striking. The films share the same underlying myth logic.

Animals R Us & We R Them

"...there are more captive tigers living in the state of Texas alone than wild specimens running free anywhere else on the planet."

Social Science Information has a special issue, June 2013; 52 (2), on the shared lives of humans and animals. Here's the full abstract of one of the articles:

In the (bleary) eye of the tiger: An anthropological journey into jungle backyards 

David Jaclin 

Université de Montréal and Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris

David Jaclin, Department of Communication, University of Montreal, CP 6128, succursale Centre-ville, Montreal, QC H3C 3J7, Canada. Email: davidjaclin@gmail.com 

Abstract: North America shelters a growing population of so-called ‘exotic animals’. If the phenomenon is not recent, it now fuels a considerable black market. Jungle backyards compose a non-negligible (yet often neglected) part of some modern ecological landscapes. This article explores problematical situations emerging from these shared humanimal lives. It presents the first results of a multi-species ethnography and examines the prevalence of what I call beastness – an antique commerce amid humans and animals that reveals not only utilitarian purposes, but also relational entanglements. Such a commerce feeds a sizeable economy and exerts major selective pressures (both biological and cultural) on organisms and their environment. For instance, there are more captive tigers living in the state of Texas alone than wild specimens running free anywhere else on the planet. From a strictly statistical point of view, the average tiger is no longer the tiger we imagine. Not wild anymore but neither quite domesticated, some animals – pioneers, in a sense – shuffle traditional taxonomical and ontological conceptions. Through biographical material, I reflect on adaptive responses as well as on zoological potentialities developed by this always-evolving bestiary. Providing serious case studies to further debates dealing with bio–eco–conservation, I discuss the influence of informational and communicational processes crystallized by some of our contemporary crossed becomings.

* * * * *

This general topic is relevant to a number of posts I've done on animation, including many of my Dumbo posts. More specifically:

Dumbo Interlude: The Bear that Wasn't

Funny Animals: Notes on Humans in Metaphysical Drag

Elephants in Cartoons: Tripping the Elephant Electric

See also Evolutionary Alienation, Where'd the Animals Go?, Ratatouille, A Quick Note on Man, Vermin, and Food, and this little snippet on Walt Disney, He has given animals souls. 

Five Animated Features: A Book?

Edited from a note to Tim Perper.

Once I'd finished my Dumbo project I decided that “Hey, I've got a book here, Fantasia and Dumbo.” The book wouldn't be a general market coffee table book, of course, but a serious analytic study of those two films for a sophisticated (and heavily academic) audience. I've already got THAT one well-mapped out so I know more or less where this thing would be going.

But I'm considering extending my coverage beyond those two films to include several others:

Porco Rosso
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Ratatouille

That gives me five feature-length films. I'd want to devote considerable time to each film, so I'd have to cut back on the Disney material. Which is OK, because I've got all this stuff online for anyone who's interested. The addition of the three other films broadens the scope of the book, which should broaden its appeal.

And it also helps one of my methodological points, which is comparative analysis. As you know, I'm big on description. And, as you also know, description is not at all a straight-forward business. Not at all. It's tricky stuff. Because these things we're describing are complex. Just WHAT do you describe, and why, and when do you stop?

Well, one way to focus the descriptive effort is to look at several examples—you know, “comparison and contrast” from composition 101. You focus on what's similar across your examples and what's different. Depending on what you're looking at, you've still got a tricky job, but at least this gives you some direction.

The addition of the other three films opens up the analytic/descriptive space considerably. Obviously I'm not aiming for a comprehensive study of feature-length animation. I just want to explore some things, both thematic and methodological, and, above all, make the point that: This is serious art worth careful and serious consideration.

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.