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As a list of challenges, those facing director Brad Bird and his producer Brad Lewis on Ratatouille were daunting. First of all there was the job of creating a suitably real visual style that somehow made a virtue of having rats as its stars.
Then there was the title, a foodstuff beloved of French cuisine but less familiar to the majority of audiences beyond those Gallic shores. In short, getting all these things right was a tall order.
"If you want an example of how different making a movie at Pixar is versus anywhere else," says Bird, "all you have to do is ask what focus group would come back with: 'we've done research and the top things that people want to see are rats, cooking and France. If we can get a way to combine these three things into one movie it's surefire!'. That's just not going to happen.
"Even though the technology is very advanced at Pixar, the impetus is very old-school Hollywood. It's all about instinct, and 'does this idea appeal to me?'. It doesn't go beyond that, we don't pre-test anything. If we pre-tested titles we wouldn't come up with Ratatouille. So it's truly down to the enthusiasm of the people at the studio and what we want to see."
Faced with the technical headache of making rats realistic but loveable, Bird and his team set about designing their lead character, Remy, a rodent with ambitions to rise above the rural slum he calls home and make it as a chef in a top Parisian eaterie.
"The first thing is you don’t say 'how are we going to make them cuddly?'," Bird continues, "you say 'how can we connect with them?'. I think that earlier in its development the way of treating that was to make them like little humans, where they're all walking around on two legs and they're not doing anything too ratlike.
"Their tails were shortened, which I thought was a mistake. When I got involved in the project I urged them to go back and make them more ratty and get rat mannerisms and rat behaviour, and allow the audience to experience that 'urgghh' feeling, because if you can get them to feel that and then move beyond it it becomes a more profound experience."
Now the film is a success all of these challenges seem not to have been so great after all. But a clue that the title might not sit well with audiences unfamiliar with that rustic dish came early on, as producer Brad Lewis recalls.
"Our lead counsel at one point called up somebody, and said 'so, Ratatooly, how's it going?'. If an educated person in America couldn't pronounce it I thought we were in trouble. We went through a bunch of really lousy titles like Petite Chef, but when Brad joined the film he felt Ratatouille was the right title.
"He gave an impassioned speech about why it was right, and came up with the idea of putting the phonetic spelling with it so that would help solve that problem for those that didn’t know."
On top of all that comes the not inconsiderable task of conveying the most mouth wateringly delicious of kitchen creations to an audience whose taste-buds, remarkably, really do get tickled watching this animated tale unfold.
"The obvious thing is that we can't make the audience taste or smell something," says Bird, "so the question became how do we represent that. What we do have is music and sound and colour and movement. So we used all of the things that we do have on our side to try and depict that. We went to our composer Michael Giacchino and said 'how do you represent the taste of a strawberry versus cheese?'.
"That’s a wonderful kind of problem to throw to an creative person, because strawberries should probably be higher, probably clearer and sweeter sounding, whereas cheese would be a heavier, lower, rounder tone. It was a way of showing what the character is feeling, and I think he was very happy to have that challenge."
"A couple of times we heard people say that they left the film hungry," Brad Lewis adds with a smile. "There couldn't have been a greater compliment to our artists than that."
ANWAR BRETT
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