[Upcoming Movie] Ratatouille trailer & behind the scenes interviews

Ratatouille (pronounced, as the handy guide on the posters tells you, as rat-a-too-ee) is the upcoming film by the CG masters of Pixar animation. After tackling toys, bugs, fish, monsters, superheroes, and cars- the studio has moved onto the setting of Paris, France and the humans and rodents that inhabit it.

Summary: A rat named Remy dreams of becoming a great French chef despite his family’s wishes and the obvious problem of being a rat in a decidedly rodent-phobic profession. When fate places Remy in the sewers of Paris, he finds himself ideally situated beneath a restaurant made famous by his culinary hero, Auguste Gusteau. Despite the apparent dangers of being an unlikely – and certainly unwanted – visitor in the kitchen of a fine French restaurant, Remy’s passion for cooking soon sets into motion a hilarious and exciting rat race that turns the culinary world of Paris upside down. 
 

The American trailergives you the basic plotline along with some great laughs. The Japanese trailer(which is in English with Japanese subtitles) focuses more on the river-scene between Remy and Linguini and really shows you the heart going into this film. I know I am already in love with the platonic human-rat relationship between Remy and Linguini and this is just from trailers.

And the details *.* Much like the beautiful scenic-shots in Cars, Ratatouille is already blurring the lines between animation and live-action with shots like this. All the details in that scene look so real, that if I didn’t know better I’d swear it was live-action with Remy CG-ed in.

I am also totally in love with this promo-image for the film. They’ve got all the details down to the small hairs on Remy’s ears and tail. And that’s not even touching how beautiful the backdrop is. Put mildly, it’s gorgeous.

In an interview with John Lasseter (head of Pixar), he mentions that he used this film for them to perfect using CGI with the squash/stretch aspect of cartoons.  To quote: “It’s one of the principles of animation that the great Disney animators kind of developed at the Disney studios,” Lasseter says. “But computer animation likes to make things that are basically rigid. We set out, after studying rats and mice, the way that they move and can curl up into a little ball and stretch out, I realized we have got to master true squash and stretch in the film. It was a lot of work, but we did it.”

And as an owner of three pet rats myself, I will vouch for the fact that from the trailers alone- Pixar did their homework. The way Remy moves when he’s walking on all fours or running, his breathing rate, and just the amount of detail in his design (as I mentioned earlier- little things like the small hairs on the ears and tail) is all accurate to a live rat. And from another Lasseter interview, it’s no surprise then that the studio had pet rats there for observation.

 Another great behind-the-production insight is the Yahoo Movie’s Brad Bird (Ratatouille’s director) interview which you can find here.

In short…  is it June 29th yet?