Ratatouille

Ass-Headed Bottom: Let bunnies, by all means, be deemed superior to human beings (I really do think there's something to that claim), but surely no one would bother defending the rat, or worse, claim an aesthetic place for them beyond the usual Halloween front porch? Some creatures will never be cute. The tarsier, for example, if we go searching through the rainforests of Indonesia. Or the RAT if we have lived even an hour anywhere the world over! Why was this movie made???

So anyway, Ratatouille is a sad decline from The Incredibles, one of the cleverer movies of the decade, directed by the same Brad Bird (who also directed The Iron Giant; this guy's a badass). The target audience then was an ingenious amalgam of overenthusiastic children, their kid-movie-weary parents, and literature majors who have taken the long route (the Iliad, Orlando Furioso, Pamela) to recognizing that comic books have always been the only thing worth reading. The target audience now, as far as I can tell, includes hopelessly immature greenies and their misraised children (of whom, granted, there must be an exploding number) and the myriad rats no doubt skittering around the movie theater. Here we have creepy scenes galore (animated skittering is still skittering, hardwired to that region of the human brain which sends shivers down the human spine), a number of uninterestingly bathetic scenes (the druggist's window of crucified rats in traps made me sleep uncontrollably), and one scene of great promise and no fulfillment: when the gawky, unpleasant male protagonist leans the supercool chick-chef over her motorcycle and glues his stupid animated mouth onto hers, and she retrieves her mace from her bag and lifts it towards his huge lemurlike eyes and prepares to blind him, Kill Bill-style... and then drops her hand and lets herself get molested. Blech. I'd rather eat ratatouille prepared by rats.

Koko: Must you spend your whole life not swallowing? And not all of us shriek girlishly when we see a rat; some of us leave cheddar-flavored goldfish crackers for it under the SUV parked in front of our apartments. Some of us are drunk at the time, and willing to feed anything with four legs, but we do respond to the creature's peripatetic quiet not with bitchy malice or quest-for-fire barbarism but with woozy, uncoordinated charity. So go write a starred review for the latest literary melange, you stuffed librarian, or go steal back your Promethean spark. Let the furrier folk among us wander their way to the crackers.