Reaction: Ratatouille

I'll start out by saying, this wouldn't have been my first choice of movie. But then, whenever I get myself wrangled into seeing a Pixar movie, I'm never disappointed and usually am very entertained. That said, the meetup group went to this last night and I have a few observations I wanted to note (these are essentially the bullets I gave them in person over dinner).

1. Love the hair effects. Hair and water are possibly the one major animation challenge left when it comes to CG work. It's subtle, but the way Collette's hair fell and the tiny little movements made it real - which is surprising considering her (and everyone else's) very cartoon faces.

2. Liked the plot device that the rats didn't "talk" to the humans in English (the humans' POV showed them only hearing frantic squeaking) - but ...well... they're still talking animals and I'm not big on talking animal movies.

3. My favourite scene also unfortunately leads into my least favourite editing decision: Our hero rat discovers a will left by our master chef that his son should inherit the restaurant (the audience knows this pretty much from the beginning). But upon discovery, the ambitious sous-chef goes on a wild chase through the city attempting to catch the rat who now has the legal proof that the restaurant will not be his. The chase was great fun... except the resolution of that scene left me slightly bewildered as to how much time passed between the chase and the revelation that Linguini was the heir to the restaurant. I was under the impression that the sous-chef had just crawled out of the water and run back to his office looking for the rat... but then the dialogue implies that some time has passed and word had already gotten around.

4. The supporting cast was amazingly fleshed out and well-designed. I've also possibly killed a man with my thumb as well. ;)