Ratatouille - Paris, A Metaphor for City Planning or a Cinematic Cliche?

A Movie Review

Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning

City Planning RP 574 Environmental Design November 23, 2007 Advisor Timothy Brennan Author Michael Cote

Ratatouille - Paris, A Metaphor for City Planning or a Cinematic Cliche? Paris is where the restaurant was born. Inns would serve only once or twice at set times, but in 1765 a Monsieur Boulanger was the first to offer his patrons a list of dishes available throughout the afternoon and evening. - Lonely Planet, Guide to Paris

Ratatouille is writer-director and Oscar winner Brad Birds hilarious animated tale whose main character, Remy, a rat afflicted by a refined palette and a sensitive nose, dreams of being a famous chef. He befriends a human named Linguini, a clumsy garbage boy who is in love with Colette, a feisty sous-chef at the restaurant they work at. Through stretched and clever physical comedy, Remy and Linguini accidentally become highly successful co-chefs. Eventually they together face their nemesis, the gloomy food critic Anton Ego. Set in modern day Paris, the film pokes much fun at a slew of cultural clichs; elitist food lovers, Parisian snobbery, egomaniacal food critics, clumsy young lovers, and bad (or good, depending on the camera angle and time of day) city design. Released in 2007, Ratatouille is a Computer Generated Image (CGI) film produced by Pixar, Disneys highly successful computer-animation film arm that was responsible for blockbusters and award winners, Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and The Incredibles.

The opening scene metaphorically defines with strange accuracy the historic hodge-podge of Paris city streets and randomly sited buildings. How Remy, the day dreaming rat, got here is a matter of circumstance. Through a series of unfortunate events, Remy is separated from his garbage eating rat family, whose nest was in the ceiling of a lovely country cottage occupied by a shotgun wielding, near-sighted elderly woman. Lost and alone in a dark, wet sewer, Remy is stranded with his favorite Chefs cookbook. After gaining courage to explore for food, he zips and darts up the inside of an old buildings walls. This is where the clichs of Parisian life begin. As he scurries up dusty beams, exposed wires and plaster-caked two-by-fours, we see that the interior walls are a complex maze of ancient and modern building materials the internal ugly underside of an externally beautiful city. Remy makes stops at three separate floors, the first is a posh caf where he tries to cop some crusty bread from the cutting table. His conscience gets the best of him and he decides not to steal from restaurants. Back into the wall he scurries up to the next floor where through a hole in the ceiling he spies the classic French couple in love and quarreling. The scene lasts perhaps ten seconds. But in that time we witness a cascade of cultural clichs; a trite young man in a striped black and white shirt, hands defensively up, and an elegantly dressed woman yelling at him loudly in French. She picks up a gun and Remy skitters away. Then *BANG* - a bullet pierces a hole in the wall just missing Remy. He then looks down at the distraught lovers who, suddenly, are now embraced and passionately kissing. Remy rolls his eyes. The third and final floor is the roof, and from here Remy realizes he is in Paris proper, with a gorgeous evening view of the Parisian sky line, river Siene, Eiffel Tower and, the restaurant of his dreams, Gusteaus. How the city became the romance capital of the world, and the backdrop for hundreds of movies begins in 1852, when Napoleon III hired Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann to

redesign down-town Paris. For centuries hundreds of politicians, planners, architects, engineers schemed and failed at revitalizing a dirty, sinful city. Bourgeois intellectuals envisioned a radical transformation of a crime ridden, medieval Paris into a modern, worldclass city that would be beautiful, rational, sanitary and vigorously commercial. But try as they might, it was only Haussmann, with an infinite purse and full reign to reconfigure as he so chose, who succeeded. His urban planning approach restructured Paris in such a profound way that the end result literally changed the attitudes and every day lives of its inhabitants. Long, straight, and very wide boulevards with couture shops, outdoor cafes and uniform baroque building facades are now the classic model of how the modern city ought to be shaped and built. The methods employed by Haussmann were deplored and reviled, for he cut wide swaths through old Paris destroying thousands of homes and livelihoods and paving over hundreds of miles of beautiful cobble-stoned streets. The shape and nature of the city was forever altered and endlessly criticized. This Haussmannisation was endeavored by a complex system of public regulatory tools that were passed and adopted by the local legislature. Expropriation (i.e. eminent domain) for purposes of public interest allowed the city to acquire buildings along areas slated for destruction and reorganization. Sewers were installed as were several public water works projects, including a pipe system that delivered natural gas to homes, businesses and streets for electricity. An early form of zoning was enacted that restricted the height and dimensions of buildings and streets. Regulatory guidelines governed the aesthetics of the building facades, including design standards, building materials and locations. An estimated 20,000 houses were destroyed and over 40,000 were built from 1852 to 1870. Projects were controlled, designed and managed by the state and carried out by private entrepreneurs, all for the welfare of the public. While the history of how modern Paris came to be has been well documented, criticized, beloved and despised, Ratatouille is the first time its been romanticized from its underbelly the rats perspective and it does so with precision and accuracy. The audience can smell Paris for the first time, rather than objectify its form as the City of Lights, the City of Love, or the

City of Boulevards. Paris is a maze of glamor and grit, stone and sewer, glass and light. Its inhabitants are proud, even on a bad day (riots, its been argued, are a demand for fine days gone past). Food works as the cultural glue in Ratatouille, clasping together a reviled, disparaged subset with the high-brow and the bourgeois. We find, then, that they are fundamentally tied, wedded in a game all designed by the complexity of urban planning. In one of the final scenes of the movie Remy is caught in a moral dilemma; does he re-join his garbage eating rat family, or stick with the humans that inherently revile him. Reconnected with his long lost family, Remy is dragged by the ears by his rat father through a dark sewer pipe, up to a wet cobble stone street and to a seedy part of Paris. He intends, with no apparent irony, to teach his son the invaluable lesson that humans are destructive by nature. There in front of them is an ominous store front: Rat Exterminators. Remy realizes for the first time that he is just a rat, and humans are not as caring as he made them out to be. After a long night out, heart-broken and estranged from his human friend, he decides to stay on the side of hope, against his fathers wishes, and work as a chef in the kitchen of Gusteaus. If any redemptive qualities can be found in the human heart, it is through their stomach. Or in the case of a movie, its vicariously through Anton Egos final critique and restaurant review ala Ratatouille as prepared by none other than Remy himself. "How ugly Paris seems after a year's absence. How one chokes in these dark, narrow and dank corridors that we like to call the streets of Paris! One would think that one was in a subterranean city, that's how heavy is the atmosphere , how profound is the darkness! (Vicomte de Launay, 1838). Though planned, revised, and re-planned over the centuries, the streets of Paris still wind and bend in medieval disorder. Parisians, flawed as they seem, have a rare pride in their city that ought to be admired, respected, celebrated. Is it possible that this pride is the result of urban regulation? Is it their storied history? Is it their love of food, a picturesque river, rich intellectualism, or baroque 16th century design? I argue that Parisian culture is indeed the residual effect of well designed city, and good design includes a messy, ugly underbelly. Remys motto is Anyone can cook. Its a flattering example of hope and self-motivation that can only be found in the most diverse cities on earth. If the Enlightenment has a certain shape and manifestation, it can be found in the modern city, and it is Paris.

Note: A brief explanation of CGI animation. Traditionally, both live action film and animated movies take advantage of the phenomenon of persistence of vision, a hypothesis that the human eye retains an image for a fraction of a second. Film is projected onto a screen at 24 frames per second, giving the illusion of a persistent, fluid motion of the action. CGI on the other hand does not use any film. Using sophisticated computer programs, graphic designers create three dimensional objects, in this case Paris and hordes of rats, that seem to move fluidly with out the use of models, actors and physical film with its a "frames per second approach." The result is a realistic, though intentionally cartoonish, visual exposition of space that audiences experience just as if the sequences were live action. Thus, we experience Remy "moving" through the sewers, streets and alleys of Paris.