Cloudy with a Chance of [insert food here]

WHERE WERE THE MEATBALLS?

But seriously, where were they?

That’s my first question for Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who wrote and directed this children’s book adaptation that fortunately does not stick to the original content. It takes Judi and Ron Barrett’s interesting idea and sticks it own interesting POV: Flint Lockwood.

Where are…the meatballs? I find it interesting to see why they didn’t have any meatballs in the movie until the very end. Maybe that was on purpose. But the golden grail for the protagonist’s goal was not spaghetti and meatballs. His initial hope to take water and make food is to make cheeseburgers.

Let’s talk about that Cheeseburger. You know the one. When Flint and Sam are on the dock, and she’s just found out that he was the creator of the rocket (she didn’t know what the machine was). Then some curious things happened. A pickle fell into the ocean, some cheese fell into the trashcan. From the SKY.

Rat-at-atouille

I’m sure most of us have seen the movie. A rat cooking, standing on Alfredo Linguine’s hair, indirectly whisking with reddish tufts of his friend’s rug. Ratatouille, written and directed by Brad Bird of The Incredibles fame, is already a classic, at least in my household. We even had a merry mixup at one point when two different people got the movie on DVD for my sister’s birthday, but we didn’t return any of the copies, so we have still just held on to both Ratatouille DVDs. 

My sister is not a movie buff, but she loves food in movies. One of her favorite movies is Julie and Julia, a biopic of sorts of Julia Child’s French cooking career, and Ratatouille could easily come as a second. Any time we would watch Remy and Co scutter around Paris and cook delicious CGI rendered French food, my sister and I would get very hungry. Not only did we immensely enjoy the filmmaking and execution of the story, but the imagery drove us to be very hungry.

The food in Ratatouille is beautiful, plain and simple. It also builds up the beauty of food quite deliciously, pun intended. The first good bit of the movie takes place on the French countryside, where the rats that we’ll come to know and love feast on garbage, which is appropriately gross. But once we get to Paris and within Gusteau’s kitchen, we see silky soup and sauces and many other French foods I’m dying to try.

But the dish I want to discuss comes much later in the film. Anton Ego, the thrashing critic voiced by Peter O’Toole, has come to destroy or make Gusteau’s again with his new review. His whole night has been delayed or downright weird by his own standards, and for the entire movie Ego has been the archvillain, the supernatural forces that work against our protagonist, whereas Chef Skinner, voiced by Ian Holm is the bumbling fool trying to stop our rat hero.

Anton Ego is served his dish: ratatouille. In the film, it is prepared by thinly slicing vegetables, placing them consecutively in a roasting dish, covering it with a sauce, and roasting in the oven. When it is served to Ego, he is immediately bemused. Apparently this is a simple dish for simple people. On the plate it is served as a small portion (not a very American thing I’m afraid), delicated balanced on a small mound of itself and drizzled with sauce. As a child watching this scene, I was highly anticipating that first bite. The Ratatouille looked very appetizing, I was salivating.

Brad Bird did something very smart next. He set up that Skinner had received the same dish, and had a very similar reaction to Ego. But Ego, who is here to eat, resolves to take a bite. He fits some sliced vegetables on his fork and tries the ratatouille. Brad Bird then uses a very famous shot in cinema, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, of dollying back while simultaneously zooming in. Funnily enough, it’s called a dolly zoom…nomenclature is so interesting. This puts us right in Ego’s face as we see everything about him change. And a quick note, for the record, just because this is an animated film does not mean that this dolly zoom technique is ineffective. As with the rest of the movie, it is wonderfully animated, to the point that suspension of disbelief is wonderfully achieved.

After Ego takes his first bite of that ratatouille, we dolly zoom into his eyes and are taken away, back to the French countryside, to when Ego was just a boy, living in a poor household with his mother. The most important mise en scene to notice is the little boy’s face, clearly sad or depressed. His mother passes by the dinner table, at which Little Ego sits, and hands him a piping hot bowl of ratatouille. This causes Little Ego to light up and dig in, showing his first sign of joy that we’ve seen in the movie.

Flash forward to the present. Ego looks at his meal with wonder and takes more bites of the ratatouille. He isn’t the same anymore, and we can see it. In his eyes. In his body posture because he sits up straighter. He even swipes a finger across the plate to make sure he’s had every last drop of the sauce. It’s THAT good, but it’s also the right thing to eat. It wasn’t just that he had a good meal, it was that he had ratatouille. No other dish could make him feel that way?

Thanks for reading my first post everybody. If you can/want to/don’t care, please leave in the comments what dish makes you flashback to your own childhood. Greatly appreciate the read!