History Headscratchers / Ratatouille

** Well, what would you have them do? Remy whispering in Linguini's ear? Biting him? When your two protagonists can't communicate, there's really only so many ways you do things without getting even more contrived. Moreover, it's an extension of what people do in real life - those moments in movies where two people become close when one person is showing someone else how to do something and touches them to do so. And considering the the movie starts out with an old lady shooting out her ceiling with a shotgun, shouldn't a little comedy be okay?

[[folder:The Misunderstood Moral]]
* Why is this movie's moral misunderstood and misinterpreted so often? In his review, Anton Ego explains it as, "Not ''everyone'' can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from ''anywhere.''" Now, I always just took that as, "Don't dismiss something as insignificant or worthless because of its humble origins"...Y'know, like a rat who cooked a five-star meal. But here on the page, someone else explains it as "Regardless of the circumstances of your birth, you should follow your dreams," and someone else on [=YouTube=] gives it as "Not anyone ''can'' cook, but anyone ''could'' cook if they trained and learned to do so properly."
** To be honest, these seem less like misinterpretations and more like more-or-less mutually-inclusive versions of the same kind of message. They all work together to say something like this: just because you're born to one set of circumstances doesn't mean you're automatically locked out of doing what you want to do. You might not necessarily become a "great artist", but that doesn't mean your background is a reason for you to not try. And even if you don't become "great", and there are others who are better than you at what you want to do, you can always still become ''better''.
** In any case, a great movie doesn't just have one single message that can be summed up by one of the characters at the end and which is the only ever possible message that can be taken away from it. All of these things are valid from what we see in the movie. Ego's message is obvious -- in this world, even a rat can be a five-star chef. The troper is right too, in that the movie also shows that the circumstances you're born and live in aren't a reason to give up on your dream -- after all, Remy's a natural, but he wouldn't have gotten anywhere if he didn't try. And the [=YouTuber=] is kind of right as well; not everyone can automatically become a great cook, or is guaranteed of becoming a great cook, but if they learn how to do so and practice, they can still learn ''how'' to cook, and perhaps become a pretty good one. Even Remy learns things that make him a better chef over the course of the story.
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[[folder:Why Not Write?]]
* Why couldn't Remy write or write through Linguini? He knows how to read, he could learn writing easily. Or at least they could've communicated with Linguini writing the alphabet and Remy getting on the letters.
[[/folder]]

*** Even assuming the world at large doesn't know about these sapient rats -- Isn't Linguini being kind of selfish in trying to [[TheMasquerade keep Remy's human-like intelligence a secret]] to further his own career? Shouldn't Remy be more concerned with getting the guy to put a good word in for his species then with [[ItsAllAboutMe what's in the white sauce?]] I know he loves to cook, but if I were spending hours in the kitchen coming up with fantastic new recipes to serve to some folks who were trying to systematically exterminate my race, I'd feel like a bit of a [[TheQuisling traitor]], even if I was [[FamilyUnfriendlyAesop following my dreams]].

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*** Not impossible, but not exactly easy either. The problem is that you're talking about erasing several millenia of hatred and enmity, and even Anton Ego knew how hard it was to get new ideas to be accepted. You'd get a few humans willing to accept the idea, but the majority would be more skeptical and harder to convince, which means that Remy would basically have to devote his entire lifetime to work with getting the humans to understand; already a hard task. Basically, he would be swapping one boring but useful job (poison checker) to another boring but useful job (test subject on rat intelligence) -- and then it becomes a movie not about daring to dream and nurturing your talents, but about giving up your own ambitions for the greater good, even when people don't appreciate what you do. I mean, the other rats couldn't care less about humans; interacting with and behaving like humans seem to be some kind of mild taboo in rat society (note Emile saying that all with all this cooking and reading and TV watching he feels like he's aiding Remy in some kind of crime); the only reason why they helped out in the end was because of Remy. Now, admittedly, they could have made it work, but abandoning cooking and instead dedicating yourself to the betterment of inter-species relationships would probably have made for a much less focused and probably less interesting movie, that would likely cause the audience to say: "Wait, didn't he want to be a chef? Why have we spent the last twenty minutes watching him crusade for rat rights?" ...okay, I kinda went off-track there, but my main point is that it would be a ''lot harder'' to change things than simply, as an earlier troper remarked, put up a video on Website/YouTube, and calling Remy and Linguini "selfish to the point of sociopathy" just because they don't try to take on a task bigger than both of them, that neither of them are probably qualified for (Linguini is ''not'' good with convincing people, as evident by his total failure to bring most of the chefs around) seems unnecessarily harsh.
*** If Pixar wanted to make a shiny, happy film about cooking rats without getting sidetracked by all that messy xenocide stuff, they [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality shouldn't have brought it up in the first place.]] Unfortunately, they ''do'' bring it up, even going so far as to let Remy's father [[StrawmanHasAPoint give a little speech about how humans kill their kind]] while standing in front of an exterminator's storefront [[NightmareFuel with dead rats hanging in the window]]. Saying that addressing this would have made the script longer or unfocused is missing the point; Pixar could have sidestepped the issue entirely if they wanted to, but instead they decided to milk it for drama and then ignore it later creating some distubing implications. Naturally, getting humanity to accept that [[FantasticRacism rats are people too]] would have been difficult, and any effort on the part of main characters' towards this end would not be guaranteed to succeed, but it's downright upsetting that every major character spends the entire film entirely preoccupied with their trivial personal concerns [[ItsAllAboutMe (I want to be a chef! I have a crush on my coworker! An excellent restaurant is about to go out of business!)]] with nary a thought for the ethical considerations of the deeply horrific discoveries they make during that timeframe . Besides, when important concerns that arise from the premise organically are being pushed aside to make way for less important, more contrived conflicts, that's just plain bad writing.

* Those goddam accents. Foreign accented-English in a movie where the characters are supposedly speaking another language is a serious pet peeve of mine. The fact that the viewer can understad the characters in such a movie means that we, the viewers, are honorary speakers of the in-story language. The characters are NOT diegetically speaking English. Thus, they should not have foreign accents, because foreign accents occur when a speaker cannot correctly pronounce another language. But they're all French, and they're all speaking French. There is absolutely no reason they should be speaking English with a French accent. Of course, Linguini has an American accent because he's the protagonist, and Ego has a British accent because he's snobby. Isn't it time we retired this ghastly nonsensical shorthand and found better ways to establish setting and characterization?

* On Linguini's second day, Skinner orders him to cook that soup he almost ruined earlier. He tries, but still has no idea what to do. He and Remy need to figure out some form of communication, so they come up with this hair-pulling thing. It propably took them a few Days of practice to truly master this skill, so when did Linguini actually cook the soup?

* Why couldn't Remy write or write through Linguini? He knows how to read, he could learn writing easily. Or at least they could've communicated with Linguini writing the alphabet and Remy getting on the letters.

** This is the same company which says good things about [[Disney/TheLionKing lions]], tigers (Jasmine's pet in Aladdin) and bears (Baloo in The Jungle Book) among various other creatures that are surprisingly deadly. Anything can be a main character in Disney, and they made Remy so cute I could care less. (Plus it probably won't encourage children to pick up a rat and hug it, since...well, they're ''rats''. Instincts are scream on sight for most of us.) Then again, Remy being a rat could be a reference to Disney's nickname [[WesternAnimation/ClassicDisneyShorts 'The Mouse']]...which by critics is mutated to be 'The Rat'.

** This is arguably the whole point of that moment, and Ego's HeelFaceTurn. Remember that Ego is a fairly elderly individual by this point, and he's probably spent decades in the restaurant scene, critiquing a parade of self-described master-chefs who tend to fall way below his standards. He almost certainly hasn't tasted of his mother's cooking for years, if not decades (given his age she's almost certainly passed away long ago, or at very least has reached such an advanced age and level of infirmity to all but completely prevent her from cooking as she did when he was a child), and it's equally likely that he doesn't really remember the taste beyond some vague nostalgic remembrances of really enjoying it. So combining the two means it'd be entirely easy for him to become convinced that true excellence in cooking is incredibly rare, limited to only a few gifted individuals and requires both a high-end restaurant's level of equipment and practically a lifetime of work and honing to the exclusion of all else to master, and even then it's still incredibly rare. However, that simple taste of ratatouille unlocks a sensory memory of the food prepared by a woman who almost certainly wasn't a professional chef, would have by no means devoted her entire life just to cooking (the fact that she raised at least one child by itself suggests otherwise), and yet was capable of cooking the best food he's ever tasted up to that point in his life, with nothing more than the kind of ingredients and tools that can be found in any household kitchen. So if his mother could cook to the same level of quality (or even better) as a professional chef, with none of their advantages of time, tools or training, then ''anyone'' can.

** Also, ''why'' would he? Sure, he's a spiteful jerk, but that doesn't make him a vengeance-driven lunatic. Even if he had Gusteau's closed down to make sure that if he couldn't have it then no one else could, that doesn't mean he's either planning to or has the time, energy, obssession and clout to devote himself to ruining these people's lives forever and ever and ever and making sure that nothing they ever do is successful.

** How could he? He wouldn't have any proof that there's a rat cooking in the kitche, and even if he tried to get the Health Inspector sent there without any evidence, the only reason that worked with Gusteau's is because there ''happened'' to be an entire colony of rats manning the kitchen at the exact time the inspector walked in. It would be child's play for a single rat like Remy to remain hidden long enough for the inspector to do his work at the new restaurant and conclude that it's sufficiently sanitary to remain open.

** In case he takes it the wrong way. If the restaurant is full of people, those are all people he can go out and tell that their food was prepared by a bunch of rats. With no one around for him to tell, it gives Colette and Linguini more of a chance to explain the situation.

* When Anton Ego asked to see the chef, Linguini and Colette told him that he must wait until the other customers have left the restaurant. Why not just invite him into the kitchen to see the chef instead of letting him sit at his table for hours until everyone else leaves?

** How could he? He wouldn't have any proof that there's a rat cooking in the kitche, and even if he tried to get the Health Inspector sent there without any evidence, the only reason that worked with Gusteau's is because there ''happened'' to be an entire colony of rats manning the kitchen at the exact time the inspector walked in. It would be child's play for a single rat like Remy to remain hidden long enough for the inspector to do his work at the new restaurant and conclude that it's sufficiently sanitary to remain open.

* What would stop Skinner from trying to get the new restaurant at the end of the story closed down?

** Linguini might have improved, but the chances that he could improve enough to be able to function as a chef without Remy's help in such a short amount of time are very slim. He might be able to cook, but he doesn't have the experience necessary to cook on the level that would be expected of him as a high-class chef.

** As I recall, the only time he's shown to be screwed without Remy's help is during the climax, when he can't recreate the sweetbread recipe people are ordering because only Remy knows how to make it. We're never told that his culinary skills haven't improved otherwise.

** In Linguini's defense, he only had a limited amount of time to recook the soup after his first night on the job, and at that point, not only was his job on the line, but he wasn't exactly well-versed in preparing dishes or the rules of being a cook. Therefore, Linguini's main priority at that point was to figure out a way to collaborate with Remy to figure out how to get out of the whole pickle regarding the soup rather than actually try to improve on his cooking skills. Once Colette starts training him, he actually does try to follow through with her advice of following recipes, but Remy's control over him gets in the way of that. In regards to him not remembering recipes, this may have been poor planning on Linguini's part, but this could probably have been due to a combination of being conflicted between taking Remy or Collete's advice and trying to keep his secret from being revealed.

* Linguini resignedly admits that he "can't cook," but what he actually can't do is improvise on the fly. And most cooks either can't or don't; Colette tells him that only the head chef can be creative, but everyone else has to "follow the recipe". Which anyone can do, provided they get the right ingredients and equipment. Given she was running him and Remy through the wringer, and Linguini was presumably given his ten thousand hours of work, it's plausible he could follow a simple recipe without needing a puppeteering rat. How come his cooking on his own didn't improve? Did he just stop trying because Remy was his crutch?

* This is more of language head scratcher, but how did the French dub deal with the Ratatouille pun when Linguini got drunk?

* Why is this movie's moral misunderstood and misinterpreted so often? In his review, Anton Ego explains it as, "Not ''everyone'' can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from ''anywhere.''" Now, I always just took that as, "Don't dismiss something as insignificant or worthless because of its humble origins"...Y'know, like a rat who cooked a five-star meal. But here on the page, someone else explains it as "Regardless of the circumstances of your birth, you should follow your dreams," and someone else on YouTube gives it as "Not anyone ''can'' cook, but anyone ''could'' cook if they trained and learned to do so properly."

* Why is this movie's moral misunderstood and misinterpreted so often? In his review, Anton Ego explains it as, "Not ''everyone'' can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from ''anywhere.''" Now, I always just took that as, "Don't dismiss something as insignificant or worthless because of its humble origins"...Y'know, like a rat who cooked a five-star meal. But here on the page, someone else explains it as "Regardless of the circumstances of your birth, you should follow your dreams," and someone else on YouTube gives it as "Not anyone ''can'' cook, but anyone ''could'' cook if they trained and learned to do so properly."