Ratatouille

"You must be imaginative, and strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work, and you must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from. Your only limit is your soul. What I say is true. Anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great."

"But you don't, Remy. You never did!"

"Amusing title, "Anyone Can Cook!". What's even more amusing is that Gusteau actually seems to believe it. I, on the other hand, take cooking seriously and no, I don't think anyone can do it."

"I don't like food, I love it. If I don't love it, I don't swallow. [Linguini gulps nervously] I will return tomorrow night with high expectations. Pray you don't disappoint me."

"[in Linguini's dream] [Linguini: Do you know what you would like this evening, sir?] Yes, I'd like your heart roasted on a spit. [laughs]"

"[in his review] In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extra-ordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: 'Anyone can cook.' But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more."

"[looks at Remy in the kitchen door-window] Surprise me....!"

"I don' really know."

"Hey there, li'l brother!"

"Food is fuel. You get picky about what you put in the tank, your engine is gonna die. Now shut up and eat your garbage."

"First of all, we are not thieves. Secondly, stay out of the kitchen and away from the humans. It's dangerous."

"[captures Remy in a cage] You may think you are a chef, but you are still... only a rat. So! I have in mind a simple arrangement; you will create for me a new line of Chef Skinner frozen foods, and I, in return, will not kill you. Au revoir, rat!"

"[takes a bite of the ratatouille; last words before his defeat] No. It can't be. [barges into the kitchen] Who cooked the ratatouille?! I demand to know! [sees the kitchen full of rats and gasps]"

"He's dying to become a chef."

"A Comedy with Great Taste."

"A Rat in a Kitchen... Cooking?!?!?!"

"Patton Oswalt — Rémy"

"Lou Romano — Linguini"

"Janeane Garofalo — Colette"

"Ian Holm — Skinner"

"Peter Sohn — Émile"

"Brad Garrett — Gusteau"

"Brian Dennehy — Django"

"Peter O'Toole — Anton Ego"

"Will Arnett — Horst"

"Julius Callahan — Lalo & Francois"

"James Remar — Larousse"

"John Ratzenberger — Mustafa"

"Teddy Newton — Talon Labarthe"

"Tony Fucile — Pompidou & Health Inspector"

"Jake Steinfeld — Git"

"Brad Bird — Ambrister Minion"

"Stéphane Roux — the narrator of the cooking channel"

"Thomas Keller — the male dining patron who asks what's new"

"Winston I. Steve Barnum — the chef-friendly male"

"Dan Lee (1969—2005)"

"I think our goal is to get the impression of something rather than perfect photographic reality. It’s to get the feeling of something so I think that our challenge was the computer wants to do things that are clean and perfect and don’t have any history to them. If you want to do something that’s different than that you have to put that information in there and the computer kind of fights you. It really doesn’t want to do that and Paris is a very rich city that has a lot of history to it and it’s lived in. Everything’s beautiful but it’s lived in. It has history to it, so it has imperfections and it’s part of why it’s beautiful is you can feel the history in every little nook and cranny. For us every single bit of that has to be put in there. We can’t go somewhere and film something. If there’s a crack in there, we have to design the crack and if you noticed the tiles on the floor of the restaurant, they’re not perfectly flat, they’re like slightly angled differently, and they catch light differently. Somebody has to sit there and angle them all separately so we had to focus on that a lot. And it was a movie about good food and the food had to look delicious and its data. How do you define what makes food look good. It’s actually a bunch of really subtle little complicated things and everybody worked really hard on it."

"I entered this movie as director kind of late. I was asked to come on the project a little less than a year and a half ago, so several characters had been cast before I got there. Famous people like Ian Holm, Brian Dennehy, and Brad Garrett were already on board and some Pixar people happened to have perfect voices, like Lou Romano who did Linguini. He was a production designer on The Incredibles. And Pete Sohn is a young, very gifted story guide and animator who worked on Iron Giant and Incredibles and he did the voice of Emile, who is Remy’s brother. So those guys are in-house and they were already involved in the project and I didn’t see any reason to change what was perfect. I re-cast a couple characters and there was a lot of difficulty in casting Remy and I heard Patton Oswalt on the radio and I thought he’d be perfect. I brought Peter O’Toole on and when I was first writing the character of Anton Ego that was the voice I heard in my mind and I was just hoping that he would say yes and he did. But Janeane Garofalo we cast after I came on and she does Colette and a lot of people can’t even recognize her because she so completely disappears into this role, which is a testament to how great an actress she is, and I’m really happy with the voice track on this film because it put the challenge to the animators to come up to the quality and be inspired by the voices – and I think they did."

"It was six years ago and you look at the scope of your film and we knew it would be about rats and we knew we needed the rats to be able to move in certain ways. Pixar’s never really done a film with four-legged critters in it to any great extent, so I was excited because some of Disney’s great classical animated films have critters running around like this. We threw down to the tools group, who writes our code because it’s all proprietary software, that we need this to be phenomenal so we actually experimented for about a year in sort of a dead end, but it was always going to be promising and something special. Brad Bird made several things work that weren’t working. We figured that once we got them outfitted correctly with the right technical setup so that they could squash and stretch beyond what’s been done before in animation, that in the hands of a director like Brad who knows animation inside and out, that it would be phenomenal. As far as the food looking great, we hoped we would pull it off and I think we did. I think appetizing food in a film like this is a surprise and if people come out hungry, which I’ve heard has happened, then that’s a testament to that"