{"id":1306,"date":"2007-07-07T19:43:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-08T02:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2007\/07\/07\/and-speaking-of-food\/"},"modified":"2007-07-07T19:43:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-08T02:43:00","slug":"and-speaking-of-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2007\/07\/07\/and-speaking-of-food\/","title":{"rendered":"And speaking of food…"},"content":{"rendered":"

We saw Ratatouille<\/span> tonight, and it did not disappoint. D didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I did, because–in her words–“It’s a rat!<\/span>” Which I found amusing, because she and the protagonist rodent both enjoy heightened olfactory senses. She can often identify the ingredients in a dish by taste, and she can distinguish Coca-Cola from Pepsi by smell<\/span>. I’m not even kidding here.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Brad Bird is becoming one of my favorite writer\/directors (as the French might say, an auteur<\/span>). I didn’t think The Iron Giant<\/span> was all that great, but that was based on Ted Hughes’ book anyway; The Incredibles<\/span> and Ratatouille<\/span> are masterpieces. Granted, both of those films were produced by the Disney\/Pixar juggernaut, but that dedication to story and character is sorely lacking in most movies.<\/p>\n

I wonder how (and what) Bird might do at another studio. The sad truth is, animated features still exist in a Hollywood ghetto, even though live-action films are using more and more computer animated visual effects. Consider: there were only one or two physical robot models built for Transformers<\/span>, the horribly unnecessary Underdog<\/span> is the demon spawn of Babe<\/span>‘s talking animals, and just about everything in the last three Star Wars<\/span> movies was (wait for it) animated. Except for the acting. (Zing!)<\/span><\/p>\n

On that note, I also enjoyed the retro logo at the end of Ratatouille<\/span>‘s credits proclaiming that the movie was made using “100% Genuine<\/a> Animation<\/a>! No motion capture<\/a> or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film.” That’s how it should be. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Robert “cast of Tron<\/span> doing bad Shakespeare”<\/a> Zemeckis! I’m talking to you!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We saw Ratatouille tonight, and it did not disappoint. D didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I did, because–in her words–“It’s a rat!” Which I found amusing, because she and the protagonist rodent both enjoy heightened olfactory senses. She…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[13,32,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-sci-tech","category-writing"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}