Ratatouille

Ratatouille is a film so thoroughly committed to the proposition that a rat can cook that it has no time for the progressive sensibilities that would come to dominate animated cinema in subsequent decades. Released in 2007, it occupies a peculiar temporal position: sufficiently recent to have been subjected to modern cultural scrutiny, yet sufficiently pre-woke in its conception that it remains largely innocent of the markers we have come to recognize. The narrative concerns itself almost exclusively with meritocracy, the triumph of culinary excellence over institutional mediocrity, and the notion that talent transcends species and social station. These are humanist themes, certainly, but they are not markers of modern progressive consciousness.

The film's representation of gender is functional but unremarkable. Colette Tatou, the female chef, exists in the kitchen as a capable professional; her presence is neither celebrated as a breakthrough nor complicated by contemporary feminist analysis. She is simply there, competent and unconcerned with the audience's approval of her competence. The film contains no LGBTQ representation of any discernible kind, no racial consciousness beyond the French setting, and no climate anxiety whatsoever. Its treatment of capitalism, while not entirely uncritical (the restaurant faces financial pressures, and the corporate villain Skinner represents a kind of soulless commercialism), lacks the contemporary obsession with systemic critique that now characterizes progressive cinema. The film does not attempt to lecture us about anything. It simply shows us a rat who cooks.

What we encounter instead is a work of craft and imagination that predates the cultural moment we are attempting to measure. To score Ratatouille on a scale designed for contemporary progressive sensibilities is to perform a kind of historical category error. The film succeeds entirely on its own terms and remains, in its way, more interesting for refusing to engage with the frameworks through which we now compulsively interpret art. It is a reminder that there exists cinema concerned solely with the excellence of its own execution.