Dialogue of the Day: Chef Gusteau’s philosophy gets mocked early in the film, dismissed by critics as naive, the kind of thing that sounds nice on a cookbook cover but doesn’t hold up in the real world. And yet the entire story exists to prove him right, using the most unlikely example imaginable, a rat who wants to cook in a five-star Parisian kitchen.
Released in 2007 and directed by Brad Bird, Ratatouille follows Remy, a rat with an extraordinary sense of taste and a dream of becoming a chef, as he forms an unlikely partnership with a clumsy kitchen worker to cook in one of Paris’s finest restaurants. Featuring the voice of Brad Garrett as the late Chef Gusteau, the film became one of Pixar’s most beloved releases precisely for taking its central philosophy seriously, proving through an unlikely hero that fearlessness, not background or pedigree, is usually what separates the good from the truly great.
Because of where you come from, there’s also something pointed in “you must not let anyone define your limits. The whole story exists to prove that line, using a rat, of all things, something everyone in the film assumes has no business anywhere near food, let alone genuinely excelling at cooking it. If greatness could come from somewhere as unlikely as that, the film argues, then background, pedigree, or where you started barely matter at all compared to the willingness to actually try. What makes the philosophy land so effectively by the end is that the film doesn’t let it stay abstract. Remy actually lives it out, taking real risks, failing plenty of times along the way, refusing to let his very obvious limitations, being a rat in a professional kitchen, stop him from attempting something extraordinary anyway. The fearlessness isn’t decoration in his story. It’s the entire mechanism by which he becomes genuinely great.
