Brad Bird made a film about a rat who wants to cook in Paris, and the miracle of Ratatouille is that it never once asks you to forget that Remy is a rat. He is small. He walks on four legs. He lives in a colony that eats garbage. Every human in the restaurant would kill him on sight, and the health department would shut the place down if they knew he was pulling Linguini's hair to control his hands. Bird described the film in a 2007 interview as a story about talent appearing in unexpected places, and the rat is the most unexpected place a Parisian chef could possibly emerge from.

The thesis of the film is spoken by Anton Ego, the critic, in his final review: not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. Dr. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson of Columbia University, in her study of French culinary culture, has documented how the kitchen hierarchy, codified by Escoffier in the nineteenth century, functions as one of the most rigid meritocracies in professional life. You advance by producing excellent food, regardless of your background. Remy takes this meritocracy to its logical extreme: if the food is extraordinary, the cook's species should be irrelevant.

The Rat and the Garbage Boy

Linguini has no talent. This is important. He is not a chef who needs a push. He is a garbage boy with no palate, no technique, and no instinct for the kitchen. Remy has all of these things and no way to use them without a human intermediary. Their partnership is a metaphor for every collaboration between vision and access: Remy has the ability but cannot operate in the system. Linguini has the access but not the ability. Together they produce something neither could alone.

The physical comedy of their arrangement, Remy hiding under a chef's hat and pulling Linguini's hair like a marionette, is Bird's way of making the metaphor literal. Every creative person who has ever worked through an institution that was not designed for them knows what it feels like to pull strings from underneath.

The Critic Who Remembered His Childhood

Ego's transformation from antagonist to advocate is the film's most emotionally precise moment. He tastes Remy's ratatouille and is transported to his mother's kitchen, to a childhood meal that was simple and perfect and made with love. The food does not impress him with technique. It reminds him why food matters. And his review, which acknowledges a rat as the chef of Paris's finest restaurant, costs him his career and his credibility, and he writes it anyway because the truth matters more.