MiniSky: Thoughts About Funny Jokes

A mouse built Disney’s empire.  A rat might take it over.

Brad Bird’s latest Pixar film, Ratatouille, is the most visually striking of the feature film’s produced by the studio.  But the dazzling animation only begins to show the greatness of this film.  We expect the animation to get better.  We know that the technology and the skills of the animators improves with the passage of time.  Bird’s strong suit in this film is the tail, er tale, itself.  Remy, a rat blessed with a marvelous olfactory sense, finds himself swept away in a storm, alone but for a copy of a cookbook penned by Remy’s inspiration, the great French chef Gusteau.  So at the prodding of Gusteau, a delightful figment of Remy’s imagination, he begins to explore his new location and discovers he is in Paris, and not just anywhere in Paris, but near the late chef’s restaurant, which under new leadership has been reduced to a shadow of itself.

Resisting his need to cook proves impossible to Remy as he discovers the new garbage boy, Linguini, destroying the soup.  The new and improved soup is a hit with a critic and with the customer’s and Linguini is pushed into a greater role, one he is incapable of handling, without Remy.  Linguini knows this and knows his job rides on his ability to maintain the illusion.  And so an unlikely partnership is created.

The execution is exceptional, and we find ourselves rooting for Remy to cook, for Linguini to succeed and for his boss, Skinner, to get his comeuppance.   At no point is a character’s motivation lacking.  There is a refreshing lack of why would he do that moments.  The ancients relied on deus ex machina to rescue a hopelessly overextended plot.  Moderns rely on deus ex charactera to rescue themselves.  Too many films hang on an improbable plot twist that leaves audiences feeling flat.

For example:

But of all the problems with Spider-Man 3, the one that bugged me most–do you still have to have a spoiler alert on a movie that’s made over $160M? if so SPOILER–was when Harry Osborn’s butler announces that, like Bruce Wayne’s Alfred, he was party to all of the Green Goblin’s doings and that he himself could testify (how, exactly?) that Osborn Sr. died by his own hand. Only with this revelation does young Harry decide to come to Parker’s aid in rescuing Mary Jane.

It’s a preposterous deus ex machina, but what’s maddening about it is that there’s a simple and elegant way to write around it: Peter Parker comes and asks Harry’s help in rescuing M.J., but, still blaming Parker for his father’s death, Harry refuses. On further reflection of his fondness for M.J., he relents and follows Parker to the fight, surprising him by coming to his aid. Instinctually, he takes a mortal blow aimed for Parker and then, on his deathbed, he forgives Peter even though he still thinks Peter killed his father. Only because of this example is Peter Parker then able to forgive Flint Marko for the murder of Uncle Ben.

Is it just me, or does this solve all sorts of narrative and motivational problems without altering the story in any structural way? Perhaps they should have kept Michael Chabon, who wrote parts of Spider-Man 2 on board for the third installment.

Jonathan Last’s point is well taken.  It’s the improbability of the situation that falls flat, a flat falling feeling that could have been avoided with a little more effort on the part of the writers.  But why would we - the audience - want story, when we have celebrity voices.  James?

As Entertainment Weekly said, en route to giving the movie a rating lower than the one it bestowed upon that hallmark of cinematic perfection, Ocean’s Thirteen – “The lack of celebrity voices is a major drawback.†After reading that I not only wanted to bang my head against a wall, but choose the sharp corner, so the pain would make me forget that he ever said that. Because nothing puts you into a fantasy dream world where a rat talks to a floating ghost of a fat dead chef like the realization that hey, that’s Mike Myers! (Which explains why the French rat has a Scottish accent, too!) He goes on: “Compare (Remy) with, say, the bad-boy Owen Wilson speedster in Cars, and you’re seeing the difference between a hero with spice and a bland one who happens to know where the spice rack is.†Well, actually, you’d be hearing a difference, since we’re talking about voice work. Also, it’s nonsense. There’s a scene in which Remy is trying to escape the kitchen; he passes a pot of soup, and can’t help go back a few times to add more ingredients. You see him think; you see his decisions in his posture and gestures. Not for a second do you think you’re watching a texture-wrapped wireframe. You buy it absolutely, and it has nothing to do with the voice, and if you think it would be better if Eddie Murphy or Jack Black voiced the character and the movie had more fart jokes and winking pop-culture references and ended with everyone singing  “Mr. Roboto†or some other so-bad-it’s-even-worse song over the credits, fine.

What too many modern critics fail to grasp is that without story, there is no story.  Oh we get some useless lip-service from an actor, often a guy like Samuel L. Jackson, who I remember giving this sort of introduction to the screenwriting awards at the Oscars. “Where would we actors be without the writers?”  Where indeed?

Rob Long noted shortly after the fiasco that Michael Richards created in a nightclub, he was basically an unfunny actor, given funny lines to say.  Without the writing he was lost.  Which is true of many of the “artists” society celebrates because of their ability to play act.  We have become I fear too celebrity driven in our entertainment.  Surrounded as they are by a collection of enablers, celebrities’ ability to interact with and cope in normal society is limited.  Which convinces them to seek more insulation from their adoring and obsessive public.  Which leads to the fawning coverage stars receive in popular press, because access is denied without complicity in the propagation of the PR flacks well crafted narrative.  This in turn makes not just their jobs, but seemingly their very existence, one enormous role.  Yet the lack of such stars (and more fart jokes, of course, can’t forget the flatulence) diminishes (in the august opinion of Entertainment Weekly) from a story which at its core is stronger than 90% of what Hollywood turns out with live actors.  It is the writing that matters.

Fans of good writing have long known that Pixar had an excellent collection of storytellers.  The best it seems is still to come.  This film marks Brad Bird’s second with Pixar.  And it also marks four straight summers with a new Pixar release.  One can hope that the bifurcated company can churn out one brilliant film per summer indefinitely.  The Golden Age of Computer Generated Animation may be past, Barnyard and Open Season for example, but the gold is still there, just with more dross to look past.  And in comparison, that gold shines all the brighter.