**** 1/2 (out of 5)

It seems that Pixar and Brad Bird (Director) can do no wrong. His previous Pixar effort, ‘The Incredibles’, is still one of my favorite super-hero movies and his animated ‘The Iron Giant’ ranks in my top 20 all-time best family films. He strikes gold again with Ratatouille, a movie about a rat with a passion for food and a dream to become a chef.

Remy is a country rat with a gifted sense of smell and taste. Food for him isn’t just a means of survival, it is a true passion. While the other rats in his pack are happy to eat garbage and are thankful for it, Remy has a more discerning palette.

For Remy, any given ingredient or piece of food he samples is akin to a composer listening to a particular musical instrument . Like the deep resonance of a violin, or the haunting etherealness of a flute, each taste of something brings to Remy an explosion of sensory fireworks. What’s more, he understands how to put these pieces together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. He is an artist, a rat chef-prodigy.

The problem of course is, he’s a rat, and people generally don’t like rats in their kitchen. His own family doesn’t understand him either. His father considers his heightened sense of taste and smell useless until he realizes it actually allows Remy to detect rat poison. His father makes Remy the clan’s official food tester thinking this will improve Remy’s spirits as well as help the clan. It helps the clan, but Remy finds it a waste of his time and talents.

Remy though, refuses to give up his dreams or passion, and this is part of the magic Bird and Pixar have become known for. They don’t make movies that try to be cute, or ‘in the know’, with a wink to the audience at their cleverness in fitting in yet another pop-culture reference (ala Shrek). They make movies that focus on character and story.

Though many of the themes of Ratatouille are common (follow ones dreams, look past differences and appearances), it touches on a few others that you don’t see too often in animated family films. One such theme explored is the idea that people who follow their passions and live by them can also become cynical and jaded after a time. In essence, these people having sought out the best there is while following their passion, begin to experience disappointment more and more frequently as they realize they may have already tasted the best cooking, heard the greatest music, saw the best film, and now just live from one letdown to another in a vain hope to once again experience greatness. It’s quite a sad concept. To begin to hate the thing you once loved. This theme seems tied loosely to one in Bird’s ‘The Incredibles’, that great artists or those with great abilities should be celebrated and revered, for through their works they have the ability to to bring us out of these cynical ennuis of the soul.

The animation is superb. From the hairs on Remy’s body, to the soft glowing glory of the city of lights, to the textures of the foods, it is all just perfect. In fact the food is rendered so well in this film you will get hunger pangs just watching it. Do NOT see this film on an empty stomach.

The characters and story are all wonderfully fleshed out, and the plot goes in directions that are surprising sometimes. After a series of events, Remy finds himself in Paris at the very restaurant of his idol, Chef Gustave. One of the plot devices concerns who the owner of the restaurant should be (Gustave died well before Remy’s arrival…partially in reaction to a poor review by food critic Anton Ego), and a lesser studio would have used the resolution of this conflict as the ending of the film, not so with Pixar which resolves this conflict around the half-way point and instead uses it as a springboard to continue the story to a much better conclusion.

As with all Pixar films, the voice talent is spot on. In particular Peter O’Toole, as the voice of food critic Anton Ego is fantastic.

There is just so much to love about this film, I could write for pages. But I’d rather you see it unfold yourself and will not go into to detail. However, one moment that comes to mind that I must mention concerns Anton ego’s character. You’ll know the scene I’m referring to as soon as you see it. I’ll just say that it will give anyone who loved the animated classic, ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’, a lump in their throat, and a tear in their eye.

Highly recommended. Just go see it.

** 1/2 (out of 5)

I must admit I have somewhat mixed emotions about this movie. On the one hand, taken purely as an action packed summer blockbuster, it delivers the goods and is quite entertaining. On the other hand, there are just too many things wrong with it to give it more than middling grade.

First, the good:

The special effects are great. Really, really great. Of course computers have always been able to render metal and rigid materials better than organic objects so the subject mater in this movie plays to the strengths of computer generated animation and it does not disappoint.

The action sequences are fast and furious and given the number of people who bite the dust, I can see why the movie almost got an R rating for violence.

Now the bad:

Everything else. The biggest problem this film has is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It tries to be a movie for kids at times. The prologue (a voice over) sounds like it came right out of one of the Saturday morning Transformers cartoons. Briefly explaining how the two races of Transformers came in being. The problem is it’s long on vagueness and short on details. Any ‘message’ in the movie is pretty much restricted to black and white good/evil archtypes. Evil means humans are lower life forms and should be killed or exploited, while good means killing people is wrong. Comic relief seems to be restricted to having the autobots speaking in 21st century pop-culture slang. Yo! Yo! Yo! Optimus is in the hizzzhaus! Yeah. Whatever.

At other times it tries to be a violent, gritty, action flick along the lines of Die Hard or perhaps Alien. The result for me was a constant cycle of tension and excitement followed by periods of eye-rolling induced groans.

Another problem the film has is many of the action sequences are cut so fast and so tight that it’s very difficult to know which transformer is fighter who. In the end it just became robots fighting robots for long periods of time.

Had the movie chosen to either be a kids flick or an adult-aimed action film, I probably would have enjoyed it much more.

The human element in the film is not bad, the two leads Sam Witwicky (Shia Le Beouf ) and Mikaela (Megan Fox) are passable, although I really had trouble understanding what Mikaela saw in Sam or why she stuck around once cars started turning into 50′ tall killbots. The best characters in the movie are actually Sam’s parents and the scenes with them are some of the funniest as well.

In the end, Transformers is fun, it’s just mind numbingly shallow and stupid…but then that’s what it’s supposed to be I guess. I’d certainly rent it and watch it again with friends or for a party, but I won’t be paying $9 to see it on the big screen again.