Remy's life starts off in the humblest of ways; he, his brother Emile, their father and colony all live in an old farm house near Paris. Remy's refined sense of smell and ability to detect ingredients has made him the colony's poison sniffer, but, while his job is really important, it isn't what he wants. In secret, Remy sneaks into the house's kitchen and creates new dishes, and reads a cook book by the great chef Gusteau. That is, until the day the old woman who lives at the house finds Remy and starts taking a shotgun to the house to get rid of him, and eventually, the colony when she discovers their existence.
When the colony leaves the rural setting, Remy gets separated from them and ends up in the sewers of Paris, and his only company is a figment of his imagination in the form of a little floating head of Gusteau. This little Gusteau acts as Remy's shoulder-angel, his chef conscience, if you will. Eventually, Remy stumbles upon Gusteau's restaurant, which has fallen under hard times. A bad review by Anton Ego not only caused the establishment to lose one of its five stars, but seemed to also break Gusteau's heart and ultimately, cause his death. In response to the owner/chef's death, the restaurant once again lost a star, so now the once great Gusteau's is just an average three-star restaurant.
At the same time as Remy's arrival at the restaurant, a young man whose mother use to be friends with Gusteau applies for a job. This man, Linguini, is klutzy and doesn't have a cooking bone in his body, so Skinner (Ian Holm), the current owner and head chef of the restaurant, makes him a garbage man; that is, until the other cooks believe Linguini is responsible for a fabulous soup that Remy prepared. The two characters, Remy and Linguini, team up to become a super cooking pair. As Remy sits under Linguini's hat, he pulls on various hairs to control the lanky cook like a marionette.
Skinner's frustration at the boy is compounded when he finds out that Linguini is the son of Gusteau (though the boy doesn't know it) and could potentially take the restaurant away from him. To further frustrate the stout cook (yes, he is short and there are plenty of short jokes in this movie), he is pretty sure he keeps seeing a rat in Linguini's presence.
As you would expect from a plot like this, Linguini falls in love with the only female cook at the restaurant, Colette (Janeane Garofalo, Mystery Men, Truth About Cats and Dogs), Linguini becomes famous and eventually the relationship between Linguini and his "Little Chef" becomes rocky and the dynamic cooking duo have a falling out. This is, of course, at the worst possible moment as Anton Ego, having written off Gusteau's, has reemerged in order to once again take down the restaurant.
Ratatouille's story is just downright fun, and the ending is really good. All the voice acting is pretty dead on, and as you would expect from anything that Pixar puts out, the animation is awesome, especially with Blu-ray quality. Even without the special features, I would recommend this version of the film. And there are special features, oh so many special features. Besides the standard deleted scenes, game and, of course, the new Pixar Animated Short, Lifted, there is a second short called Your Friend the Rat hosted by Remy and Emile.
But all of that is also on the DVD version. What makes the special features on the Blu-ray really stand out is the Cine-Explore (a segment supposedly included on all Disney Blu-ray discs), which shows tons of behind-the-scenes featurettes about how Pixar works. You get to see footage of the animators sitting in a small theater talking over practically every scene in the movie, as well as discussions about developing the script, and, one of my favorites, a film-eulogy for the scenes that didn't even make it into the Deleted Scenes (mind you, these are typically 15 to 20 second shots, but they still took weeks to do and their animators are obviously torn up over the matter). There are so many featurettes under the Cine-Explore label that most of the screen is taken up by the list and there is easily another movie's length of content there.
Ratatouille is just a great movie that has a good story, great acting and great visuals. Like I said above, that alone makes the film worth buying, but the high-def quality of the visuals compounded with the overflowing special features makes the Blu-ray version a very good choice.
