Episode 143 - Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007)
Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Chris and Alex return for a brand new season of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, beginning with this special episode on Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), the eighth computer-animated film from Pixar Animation Studies and one of the studio’s cleverest in how it uses the metaphor of food and cookery to discuss ingenuity, artistry, and what it means to value creativity. Topics on the menu include the Europeanness of Ratatouille’s Parisian setting and how it departs from Pixar’s previous depictions of modern American; anthropomorphic subjectivity and the impact of new points of view on the accessibility of virtual space; the film’s symbolic rejection of Hollywood’s industrial shift to motion-capture through its comedic fantasies of control and the framing of cooking as an art; and how Brad Bird’s film incorporates both montages that “underdetermine” narrative acts and reflexive techniques that highlight Ratatouille’s own status as a computer-animated construction.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Brooke-Rose, Christine. 1981. A Rhetoric of the Unreal : Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. Children's Media and Modernity Film, Television and Digital Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holliday, Christopher. 2016. “‘I’m Not a Real Boy, I’m a Puppet’: Computer-Animated Films and Anthropomorphic Subjectivity.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11, no. 3: 246-262.
Power, Paul. 2008. “Character animation and the embodied mind–brain.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 3, no. 1: 25–48.
Wells Paul. 2009. The Animated Bestiary. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.
Wyatt, Justin. 1994. High-Concept Cinema: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press.