ratatouille

i started this a few days ago, but neglected to post it:

yeah. far below cars, nemo, and the toy stories for me. down at the bottom with bug's life (speaking of just pixar movies). three things:

1) in the beginning there was a crazy granny shooting a shotgun at the rats all over the place. an extended scene that showed her reloading the shells and stuff too. couldn't she have used a frying pan or something ? i'm not keen on jake seeing very much gun violence yet. i may take him to the woods and teach him some gun safety some day, but it sent chills down my spine the first time he came home from preschool and pointed his finger and said "bang!" you may have a different view.

2) at one point, the mean chef running this restaurant says in a very dramatic and angry voice to the red haired not good chef on his first day "welcome to HELL!". just totally unnecessary.

3) later, the same mean chef gets the not good chef (who the rat is helping) drunk on wine. again, just unnecessary for a movie i'm bringing my 3 year old to. i didn't mind wine being the drink of choice all thru a foodie movie set in paris, but this was kind of annoying. sure jake didn't get it but an older kid would. i dunno maybe i was over reacting on that part - i don't remember all the tom and jerry and bugs bunny stuff we grew up on. i know they used that occasionally.

also, this movie was the first pixar to use humans prominently as the main characters. i just don't know that they pulled it off. also, jake still gets pullups with buzz and woody on them. nemo and cars merchandise sells like hotcakes. from a business standpoint, what did they do to set themselves up to sell merchandise? they didn't really try hard to make the rat fluffy and cute such that it would sell a lot. also, ratatouille ends up being a dish they make near the end - it's not even a character's name.

to further illustrate all this, around the 90 minute mark of this 110 minute film, both jake and the similarly aged kid in front of us asked if they could go home.

in the end, it was worth seeing and i might even buy it, but i'm not sure when jake will see it again.

Posted by smc at July 2, 2007 10:36 AM