Trivia tropes:
- Celebrity Voice Actor:
- In the Latin American Spanish dub, Django was voiced by the late TV actor Héctor Bonilla.
- In the Japanese dub, Alfredo is voiced by TV actor Ryuta Sato.
- Completely Different Title:
- In Japanese, the movie is titled Rémy's Delicious Restaurant, which also spoils the ending.
- In Lithuanian, it's La Troškinys.
- In Vietnamese, it's called The Mouse Chef. note In their defense, "rat" and "mouse" is the same word in the local language. Rémy's species would be a chuột cống, sewer rat, but who'd put that in the title?
- In Cantonese, it is titled Five Star Head Mouse, also a pun as "mouse" in Cantonese sounds very familiar to "chef" as in "head chef".
- Creator-Chosen Casting: Brad Bird cast the late Ian Holm as Skinner after seeing him in The Lord of the Rings.
- DVD Commentary: With writer/director Brad Bird and producer Brad Lewis. Only available on the Blu Ray release.
- Executive Meddling: For the better, perhaps. The film's original director, Jan Pinkava, was replaced with Brad Bird after Pinkava was unable to come up with a satisfactory resolution to the story. Bird, who had won an Oscar for his work on The Incredibles a year earlier, was given a tight deadline to rewrite the script using already finished models of the characters in place and make it better! Among the most apparent changes were redesigning the rats to make them less cartoony and killing off Gusteau, only having him appear through Rémy's imagination. He won a second Oscar for this film. Needless to say, he took a brief hiatus from film-making after this.
- Fake Nationality:
- Americans Janeane Garofalo and Brad Garrett play Colette and Gusteau, and the British Ian Holm voices Skinner. None of them are French.
- Lou Romano as Linguini, who is half-French, half-most likely Italian (he's named after a type of pasta and his mother's name was Renata). Romano is American.
- Will Arnett is a Canadian playing a German sous chef.
- Incidental Multilingual Wordplay: In the Spanish dub, the movie has the same title: "Ratatouille". However, rat in Spanish is "rata", and it's pronounced exactly the same as in the word "Ratatouille", so the pun is more subtle.
- Missing Trailer Scene: Some of the trailers featured a scene of Remy escaping through the kitchen door as various implements embed themselves in the wood. This scene never occurs in the movie.
- Pet Fad Starter: Sales in pet rats went up considerably after this film's release. Not the worst case of this trope, as rats are relatively easy to care for even for a child, but it did lead to some abandoned rats.
- Playing Against Type: Brad Garrett, mostly known for voicing "thugs and oafs" in his own words, voices the kindly, wise, French chef Gusteau.
- Port Overdosed: The video game adaptation has some notoriety for being released on just about every single conceivable platform that was available at the time. This includes all major consoles for the sixth- note GameCube, Xbox, PS2 and seventh-generation note Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, both computer platforms note Windows and Mac, PSP, plus three Reformulated Games for the Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance and mobile phones, bringing the platform total up to a whopping twelve, an extremely unusual platform count for a brand new licensed game.
- Reality Subtext: Comedienne Janeane Garofalo plays a woman who had to fight tooth and nail to become successful in a career dominated by latently sexist traditions. She famously left the writing staff of Saturday Night Live after one season because the male-dominated team made it what she called a "boy's club."
- Real-Life Relative: In the Mexican Spanish dub, Remy and Django are voiced by real-life father-and-son Héctor and Sergio Bonilla.
- Role Reprise: All of the actors from the film reprised their roles for the tie-in game.
- So My Kids Can Watch: Patton Oswalt's stand-up routine is not only quite vulgar, but filled with obscure, nerdy references and not appropriate at all for kids. He has one routine about how, in the press tour for this movie, he had a lot of trouble being positive and friendly in front of his audience. Although the man does do quite a lot of voice-work for many other lower-profile kid-friendly projects, so it was probably more about the required constant promotion of the film. His profane rant on Black Angus is what got him approached for the role; in addition to being really funny, Brad Bird liked the sound of Oswalt describing the food in his routine.
- Troubled Production: The film was originally developed in 2001 by Jan Pinkava, but Pixar lost faith in Pinkava and ultimately replaced him with Brad Bird.
- Voiced Differently in the Dub: In the Japanese dub, Rémy, voiced by Daisuke Kishio, sounds like a peppy young man in his twenties at the oldest and uses the pronoun boku.
- What Could Have Been:
- Gusteau was originally going to be more involved in the story — still living, but too depressed and gloomy from Ego's review. The producers felt the story was complicated enough, so his role was trimmed down and he was ultimately killed off.
- "Chop-Socky" Gusteau is the only one of the "Sell-Out" figments of Gusteau that never speaks. This is because the voice actors couldn't locate the fine line between "convincing Chinese accent" and "exaggeratingly racist accent".
- One proposed promotional campaign for the film involved stocking themed French-bottled wine in Costco stores. However, the idea was shot down by the California Wine Institute, who expressed concerns that the campaign would encourage underage drinking, particularly singling out the presence of cartoon characters on the label
◊. The fact that Ratatouille was due to release during a major boom in merchandise for competing films also discouraged Disney and Pixar from going ahead with the idea.
Assorted Trivia:
Ratatouille is a garlicky stew of mostly squash, eggplant, red bell pepper, and tomatoes, and whatever else the cook might have on hand that day and want to use up. While the film implies that it's a lowly provincial peasant dish, the version served to Anton Ego is a
haute cuisine variation called "
confit byaldi" that takes about four hours to prepare.
