Ratatouille

Ratatouille was a lot of fun. Mark Kermode was on The Culture Show last night saying he didn’t like the film because it was too polished, too perfect, but I disagree. Pixar are still taking risks, still pushing to get a different flavour from the last film, and the one before. Ratatouille was a familiar Pixar premise – underdog fights against adversity, with a little help from friends and family along the way – but taken to extremes. A rat wanting to be a Parisian chef? That’s as underdog as you get.

It bumbled along, checking boxes, having tensions and resolutions just where you expected, although the pacing got a bit wobbly towards the end where what seemed to be the main conflict was cleared up just in time for a new one to take over, but thanks to just the right amount of warmth and humour, it pulled through. Brad Bird’s storytelling voice is also a little different from other Pixar directors’, a little more glib and quirky, which makes for films that on the plus side are less obvious and predictable, but also seem to have a slightly greater distance between audience and storyteller, a small wall to overcome.

I didn’t like everything here – the puppeteering aspect was a bit hard to believe, and the laziest storytelling possible occasionally came out (opening voiceovers, a way to make the main character talk to himself to simplify exposition, institutions represented by individuals etc). Perhaps it’s having seen too many anime like Hikaru no Go and La Corda D’Oro in which a protagonist is given an artificial way to become a great success, only to soon realise how shallow and meaningless that is, leading to a yearning to excel with their own talent – but here we didn’t get that, and Linguini, while soon realising Rémy needed credit where it was due, never showed a desire to learned from his extremely gifted little friend. Quite strange, to see a big Hollywood film saying not, ‘With enough hard work, anyone can succeed,’ but rather, ‘Some have great innate talent, and allowances should be made for them.’

Visually, Pixar are still at the top of their game. It is the duty of animation to put in front of our eyes stories that no other visual medium can express so well, and Ratatouille is full of instances that fulfil this stipulation. Chase scenes between a diminutive man on a moped and a rat, a camera that sweeps through tiny cracks in walls and soars like a bird, a drawing in a book coming to life while always remaining that same illustration even in motion, a room shaped exactly like a coffin – moments of sheer visual excellence. And on smaller scales, too: it is well worth noticing that the depth of field is extremely shallow when the shot is of a rat’s face, as it would be were there truly a camera on something very small. Such a subtle, clever way of replicating a real lens. The Pixar animators are to be applauded.

I found it interesting to see how the writers set the film in France, yet relied so much on English-language puns and wordplay that will be hard to translate. I wonder how these elements were rendered in other regions.

On the whole, then, a clever and enjoyable film, visually stunning, but with some storytelling issues that prevent it from being quite up there with Pixar’s – and Bird’s – best. Oh, and I must say one more thing: Peter O’Toole is awesome.

(expanded from impressions, 15.10.07)

焼きたて!! ジャぱん / Yakitate!! Japan

Once in a while, from the thousands of manga titles out there, something so utterly bizarre and original comes along that stands out amongst generic and eccentric series alike. These things usually pique my interest: after all, my favourite anime of all time revolves around a traditional board game. But Yakitate!! Japan is so crazy, so bizarre, and so hilarious that I found it irresistible. There is, in fact, a whole genre of manga based around cookery: Cooking Papa, Cooking Master and others dramatise the lives of chefs. But none strike the same chord as Yakitate!! Japan.

Young Azuma Kazuma’s life changed forever when his sister forced him to try some bread as a child. The son of a rice farmer, he was devoted to Japan’s staple carbohydrate, but bread changed his life – he became a baker, helped by his naturally warm ‘solar’ hands, and set about trying to create a national loaf for his country, which he will call ‘Japan’ (‘pan’, from the Portuguese, is the Japanese word for bread, and of course isn’t the name for the country in Japanese).

It took some time for me to warm up to the anime, especially as a fan of the manga. The art and animation looked cheap and very ugly beside the very professional manga art, the voices didn’t match up to the ones I’d imagined (especially the woman who played Tetsunosuke in Peace Maker Kurogane as Azuma: far too brash, even for his country accent) and the comedy timing never seemed quite right. Until Yotsubato!, I considered Yakipan the funniest manga I’d ever read, and that was part of what made me keep watching: I was waiting for gags I’d found hilarious in the manga to be repeated, mostly still very funny in anime form, and anticipating gimmicks that were tailor-made for the manga (such as when it all becomes colour) to see how they would be adapted. But towards the end of the series, there was more than that to look forward to: the fillers increased, and new gags were added. The anime was braver with parodying current series, One Piece and Naruto both getting nods. The character voices never did feel quite right, but I got used to them, and started to look forward to new episodes.

The comedy of the series revolved around bread being so very delicious that those who have a sensitive palate cannot help but have a strange reaction to the flavour. This starts out with them seeing visions or their bodies involuntarily doing something slightly odd like forming a kanji character, but it grows through causing the tasting judge to relive their past romantic affairs, to sending them to the afterlife, and ends up even changing the course of time itself. It’s daft, insane, and many times totally brilliant.

The final episode was painfully hurried, bringing with it that usual unsatisfying feeling you usually get when an anime ends before the manga is even thinking about wrapping up. Well, at least it’s only a comedy anime about baking bread, so there aren’t many loose ends left untied – and in all fairness, the tournament setup tends to be a dull way to prolong a shounen manga. But despite that, I actually feel lucky to have experienced this strange and delightful story of competitions, comradeship, romance and bread.

(collated from impressions, 11.3.05 and 19.6.06)