The Film
Just when you think Pixar has run out of new ideas, they come up with something so original it makes you wonder how their brains are wired. Ratatouille is the story of a rat who is drawn (no pun intended) toward a life outside his lot, the life of a gourmet chef! Rats in the kitchen may take some getting used to, but then that's what the film is about: challenging our pre-conceived notions about life and our place in it.
After being chased out of his home in the rafters of a country house in rural France, Remy the rat finds himself at one of the top restaurants in Paris, Gusteau's. At the restaurant, Remy observes a gustatory crime about to be committed - bad soup! - and finds himself compelled to act. The tale revolves around the idea that anyone can move beyond his or her station in life with a little perseverance, creativity and perhaps a pinch of saffron.
The animation (as usual for Pixar) is top notch, with subtle emotions conveyed convincingly in the faces of both the rats and their human accomplices. Shots of Parisian streets, restaurants and sewers provide an almost photo-realistic backdrop for the action. But it's the hands (or more accurately the paws) which nearly steal the show, with details and motion so life-like and expressive you'll begin to believe these walking talking anthropomorphic rodents are real.
The Picture
Animated films--specifically Pixar-animated films--provide some of the best demo fodder at electronics shows. As a straight digital transfer from the original computer-generated source to disc, the Blu-ray mastering professionals need not worry as much about tedious tasks such as color correction or frame jitter in old-fashioned analog film. Back before the days of Blu-ray Disc, Brad Bird's previous work, The Incredibles (on standard DVD) was featured at more than a few home theater demos at CES and CEDIA Expo. And the same is now true for Ratatouille on Blu-ray Disc.
The 1080p 16:9 transfer (letterboxed to 2.35:1 to preserve the cinematic aspect ratio) is wonderfully detailed and full of rich saturated colors. The film is encoded with the AVC codec in MPEG-4 format and is as artifact-free as any high def transfer I've seen to date. Watching the disc through a 1080p Epson projector projected onto a 92-inch screen, and watching from about nine feet away, the experience was at least as enjoyable as viewing the film at a local theater, if not more so.
The Sound
As with many other Disney films, the soundtrack was encoded with their standard 24-bit 48 KHz uncompressed 5.1-channel PCM mix. Although they might have done a little better with Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, the PCM soundtrack was full and dynamic with plenty of impact during the gun-shots, lightning and pot-clanging chase scenes, but with excellent vocal intelligibility during the many dialog-rich interactions among the human characters and among the rodents.
As an aside, each species member speaks English to each other and rats seem to have no trouble understanding the human tongue, but rat-speak is apparently unintelligible to humans, which forces a more complex (and comical) kind of communication between Remy and his human helper Linguini. This device is certainly more effective than using subtitles for the rat-speak, or for the local French, for that matter, which is arguably what the human characters would be expected to speak.
But back to the sound… The overall sonic presentation is top-notch but it seemed like the surround channels were not used as extensively as they could have been. During the cacophonous chase sequences and melees, the rear channel could have been a tad bit heavier in order to immerse the viewer in the action. This is a subtle criticism however, and sins of omission are (in my opinion) always better than sins of commission.
The Extras
Unlike some studios that seem to think that a phenomenal video and audio transfer are enough to keep us happy (actually, they're the most important things to me), Disney and Pixar are using Blu-ray to its full advantage with a suite of extras that leaves the standard definition DVD of the film--as well as many other high definition titles--in the dust.
The Blu-ray Disc includes a number of featurettes, several deleted scenes (unfinished), two animated Pixar shorts, previews for other Disney titles on Blu-ray, DVD and coming to theaters, a "Cine-Explore" feature (PIP-based commentary and vignettes available in snippets or all at once), and "Gusteau's Gourmet Game," a simple but fun BD-Java game where you're a chef-in-training tasked with keeping up with a rapid-fire onslaught of restaurant orders. One particular vignette, "Remembering Dan Lee," is a touching tribute to a young artist on the Pixar animation team who passed away during the making of Ratatouille.
All in all, it's a very satisfying collection of extras that provides insight into the film-making process, some pure fun and a tasteful tribute to a fallen fellow animator.
Final Thoughts
Although I admit the initial previews I'd seen of Ratatouille didn't intrigue me enough to seek out the film, its Oscar win and general buzz among fellow film-lovers did catch my interest and I'm glad they did. Ratatouille is one of the finer animated films I've seen in recent years, both as a story and as a cinematic achievement, and the Blu-ray Disc version of the film will provide hours of entertainment and enjoyment to even the most jaded of film aficionados.
Where to Buy:
Product Details:
| Overall | |
|---|---|
| Video | |
| Audio | |
| Movie | |
| Extras |
