Inside the Ratatouille DVD at Pixar

At the end of October, Cinematical was part of a group of journalists invited to Pixar's Emeryville, CA studios to get a look inside the making of the Ratatouille DVD. Walking in to the studio's bright, beautiful complex, it felt almost like visiting any other Bay Area high-tech company; that familiarity's erased as soon as you spot the life-sized Mike and Sully from Monsters, Inc. by the reception desk -- or the larger-than-life-size replicas of The Incredibles standing guard over an upstairs common area. The walls were lined with framed concept art and storyboards; someone whizzed by on a Segway; it was just another day at the Pixar office. Check out our gallery below.



First, supervising animator Mark A. Walsh talked about his work as one of the prime architect of the animated rat characters in the films, as well as the challenges Pixar's animators faced in turning real rats into furry friends, and the kind of research involved in animating animals: "We'll kind of get to know rats as animals, and we'll tend to usually go overboard -- we did this with Nemo -- where we go to an extreme as far as animating rats. So we'll take clips of real rats eating and crawling and climbing and we'll animate exactly that and try to get a feel for how they locomote and the mechanics ... Then, when we get into blending the acting and the more human experience into the animation, we kind of have an idea of where that kind of line falls; we can do completely human characters, or we can do completely rat (characters) and then we look at all those tests we've done that are very realistic and we'll kind of pick and pull little ideas out of them and sprinkle that into our acting. On Ratatouille, we went through a learning curve during production, where we would do kind of sniffing and nose-twitching that are very common when you watch rats and put them into our acting here and there and we found that Brad (Bird, Ratatouille's director) found that as he was editing the movie together, these things were popping up a little more often than he would like, so he asked us to pull back from the 'rat-isms,' as we wound up calling them. ..."

Of course, you can pull back on the 'rat-isms,' but you're still making a movie about rats. Walsh spoke about the challenge presented by Ratatouille that reviewers and commentators noted -- that we see rats as disgusting, and in the real world try to keep them as far away from food as possible. "Some of the things that we were conscious of was making sure you saw Remy wash his hands before he was going to touch food, and if we were entering a scene where he was going to be cooking, to try to keep him from walking on all fours, to keep the hands clean ...we would subtly pull back on some of the rat stuff there, so we could subconsciously not creep the audience out too much when he was handling food. And then we would get more humanistic in our acting there ..."

But at the same time, this is Pixar -- and fine-tuned realism in the realms of the fantastic is a studio tradition. It was, Walsh noted, important that the rats still be rats: "I spent a lot of time at the head of the film researching rats and how their bodies work, and looking at other animated films that kind of achieved a similar blend of 'animal' versus 'acting'; Brad constantly referenced Lady and the Tramp or, say, Bambi, where those were characters ... I mean, Bambi was a deer, and Thumper was a rabbit, and Lady and the Tramp were dogs, and they moved like dogs and behaved like dogs ... yet they were characters we loved and they acted and performed and they were convincing ... (Bird) wanted that kind of a blend. So I spent a lot of time learning about the rats, and exploring where the scales were tipped too far to one side or the other. ..." And Walsh learned a few thing about rat anatomy he's never thought of before. What was he most surprised to learn? "Probably how twitchy they are, and how light and small they are -- so in the timing of one pose to the next, you had to make them feel small by moving them quicker, and how quickly they change directions; their whole body's an arrow that points with their nose. ..." I, of course, couldn't resist and asked Walsh to relay the most disgusting thing he learned about rats -- something where he thought, "Boy, that's interesting, but it's not going anywhere near the movie?" His reply was short and sweet, delivered with a shudder of disgust: "That they leave a trail of urine almost everywhere they go, almost like a turf marking, if you will. ..."

Next was a look at the world Remy looked in, courtesy of director of photography and lighting Sharon Calahan and production designer Harley Jessup. The two spoke about how their Paris mixes movie magic and the mundane for a unique vision of the city. Jessup explained that Ratatouille's real-world setting was a challenge and a blessing: "The film I worked on before was Monsters, Inc. where it was wide-open as to what a monster world would look like. I actually really enjoyed designing around Paris; it's such a beautiful city. At the same time, we're not trying to mimic reality exactly; we're always caricature the set design, and trying to make a world that is extra appealing, so we tried to create a fairy tale version of Paris."

Interestingly, while Walsh explained how the animating team looked to animated films about animals for inspiration and interpretations, the design side of the film avoided animated features and shorts set in Paris (The Aristocats, Chuck Jones's "Gay Paree"). Instead, as Jessup explained, they looked to the 'reel' Paris for Ratatouille: "I looked at those (Paris-set animation pieces), but at the same time, we were trying to do something new, so we almost purposely did not reference those. We were looking at a lot of live-action movies set in Paris -- Amelie, Bon Voyage. I was even interested in the Hollywood version of Paris -- like An American in Paris -- too see the '50s studios, how they were showing it." At the Same time, Calahan stressed that they weren't simply borrowing other looks for their film: "Of course, we also wanted to have our own view on it of what it was like to be there ourselves and feel it and experience it and get that kind of emotional quality into it instead of just looking at something from somebody else's point of view. ..."

And getting "point-of-view" right was a concern for the film makers -- even, as Jessup explained, if it occasionally cost a little of the production team's dignity. The differences in perspective and size between humans and rats meant that the design team had to get a very close-up view of Paris for the film: "... because we have this sort of dual-level story to tell, we were looking at things from a rat point of view as well as a human point of view -- so we were sort of crawling around on the streets and under stoves ... and you hope people don't care." Calahan laughs at the French response: "We got a lot of funny looks in Paris; "Why are they photographing their food?"" Jessup explained that Paris was so crowded with other shutterbugs, they almost blended in on their research expeditions: "It's sort of freeing; there are so many tourists in (Paris) that the Parisians think "Oh, crazy Americans." They don't care." Calahan interjects: "Except the police interrogated us once, because we were taking pictures of something we weren't supposed to be taking pictures of. A consulate building. ..." Ever a production designed, Jessup sighs an interjection: "... at night ... beautiful ..." Calahan explains that there was some concer on the part of the Paris police that the two might have been up to no good " ... until they heard our American accents."

Calahan worked extensively on the color and brightness timing for the DVD and Blu-Ray release of Ratatouille, but when she and Jessup talk about the home video release, they sound like fans, not employees; Jessup talks about the extras with excitement in his voice: "There were various documentaries that were made; Sharon does one about lighting; there's one about the design of the food; there's a great segment comparing Brad's passion as a film maker to Thomas Keller's passion as a chef (Keller, a noted California chef, was a consultant on Ratatouille), and there's so many similarities -- it's interesting." And Calahan expresses her interest in an extra that speaks to the family feel evident in so many Pixar productions: "There's a documentary about Michael Giacchino's score that was done by his 9-year old son ... I can't wait to see that."

I had to ask the twosome: What was the most memorable meal they had researching the film? Calahan, apparently, didn't get to feast for her preparation: :Well, I did the low-budget research trip, so (laughs). ..." But Jessup related how at one point his immersion in French cuisine nearly drowned him: "We had a lot of good meals -- there was a meal at Guy Savoy in Paris, where we ordered the tasting menu, and I'd never done that before. After about nine courses in, I was thinking "Well, that was the most fantastic meal ..." Well, another nine courses were on their way; it was this combination of just delight and fright; "Can I eat more of this?" And Jessup also spoke about the problems raised for some people by the association of rats and food: "You may notice in the film -- almost to a hilarious extent -- we have Remy washing his hands before, the rats all go through the dishwasher first; it was a huge consideration how to do this movie and not have people turned off by the idea of a rat in the kitchen. There are some people who can't get over that; I think Brad was pretty careful, though, in how he set that up on a story level. ..."

Our final stop of the day was a Pixar screening theater; normally used for animation collaboration and in-house projects, we were being shown an 11-minute short made for the Ratatouille DVD called "Your Friend the Rat." Writer-director Jim Capobianco explained the short's genesis: "I had the concept to kind of do an "educational" film about rats. ..." His air quotes around "educational" set the mood for the short -- it's a wacky, funny romp through the history and science of rats from the dawn of time to today; not only is it loaded with facts, but it's also Pixar's first 2-D animation short. Previous Pixar end title sequences have been shot in 2-D, but "Your Friend the Rat" marks the first time its been used to tell a story. Featuring the voices of Patton Oswalt and Peter Sohn as Remy and Emile, the brothers give a breezy zip through all things rat -- stopping along the way for such innovative animation moments as a claymation stop-motion sequence and another made solely of chalkboard drawings captured through photography. "Your Friend the Rat" even tries to clear up that whole bubonic plague rap that rats have been getting since the dark ages. ... And with that, the day was done, but an accidental bit of scheduling provided the best possible close to the day: As the visiting journalists filed out of the screening room at the end of the Ratatouille DVD tour, a group of Pixar employees were waiting to enter the theater to work on Pixar's next film.

For more on Pixar's Ratatouille DVD, check out Erik's review.