“The multitude of animators clearly paid close attention to facets of our daily lives that we take for granted: knife marks on a cutting board, the way raindrops splash when they hit the sidewalk, the glow from a street lamp. Sitting through “Ratatouille,” it doesn’t take long for you to forget that you’re watching an animated movie and just allow yourself to become immersed in this glorious realism.”
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By all means admire the tight little flourishes if that’s what turns you on—sedate “shimmering” effects, like anal-retentive hairs on the back of Remy’s coat (except I can’t help recalling that last year’s Happy Feet did much the same thing to considerably less applause—poetic evocations there, always a serendipitous ripple of abstract mass and line, of imagination in love with its own visual daring, whereas in Ratatouille it’s mainly a matter of technique, something the animators do because they can, as part of a strict mimetic program). But all this emphasis on literal replication, what I’ve touched upon elsewhere as the homuncular urge, seems a creative dead end, as naturalistic painters discovered in the 19th century and, let’s assume, computer animators will eventually also. Meanwhile there’s “reality” and the imaginative cramp that comes with it. How very much like what we already know . . . except isn’t that why we have live-action movies?
