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**** It wouldn't necessarily be that easy. People would be more likely to assume that it was all some clever stage trick and/or that Linguini was simply a gifted animal trainer. If they tried partnering Remy up with someone beside Linguini, that other someone would likely be suspected to be "in on the trick." And even if it ''was'' accepted that Remy was intelligent, that wouldn't necessarily mean people would accept that ''all'' rats are.
***** Scientists have already devised many tests of animal intelligence that Remy could easily complete with or without a human partner. Results would need to be replicated in a controlled environment, but saying it would be impossible to get the word out when Remy is so clearly of human-like intelligence is depressing. Either Remy and Linguini are selfish to the point of sociopathy, or humanity in this film really, really sucks.
****** Not impossible, but not exactly easy either. The problem is that you're talking about erasing several millenia of hatred and enmity, and even Anton Ego knew how hard it was to get new ideas to be accepted. You'd get a few humans willing to accept the idea, but the majority would be more skeptical and harder to convince, which means that Remy would basically have to devote his entire lifetime to work with getting the humans to understand; already a hard task. Basically, he would be swapping one boring but useful job (poison checker) to another boring but useful job (test subject on rat intelligence) -- and then it becomes a movie not about daring to dream and nurturing your talents, but about giving up your own ambitions for the greater good, even when people don't appreciate what you do. I mean, the other rats couldn't care less about humans; interacting with and behaving like humans seem to be some kind of mild taboo in rat society (note Emile saying that all with all this cooking and reading and TV watching he feels like he's aiding Remy in some kind of crime); the only reason why they helped out in the end was because of Remy. Now, admittedly, they could have made it work, but abandoning cooking and instead dedicating yourself to the betterment of inter-species relationships would probably have made for a much less focused and probably less interesting movie, that would likely cause the audience to say: "Wait, didn't he want to be a chef? Why have we spent the last twenty minutes watching him crusade for rat rights?" ...okay, I kinda went off-track there, but my main point is that it would be a ''lot harder'' to change things than simply, as an earlier troper remarked, put up a video on [[YouTube]], and calling Remy and Linguini "selfish to the point of sociopathy" just because they don't try to take on a task bigger than both of them, that neither of them are probably qualified for (Linguini is ''not'' good with convincing people, as evident by his total failure to bring most of the chefs around) seems unnecessarily harsh.
******* If Pixar wanted to make a shiny, happy film about cooking rats without getting sidetracked by all that messy xenocide stuff, they [[Acceptable Breaks From Reality|shouldn't have brought it up in the first place.]] Unfortunately, they ''do'' bring it up, even going so far as to let Remy's father [[Straw Man Has a Point|give a little speech about how humans kill their kind]] while standing in front of an exterminator's storefront [[Nightmare Fuel|with dead rats hanging in the window]]. Saying that addressing this would have made the script longer or unfocused is missing the point; Pixar could have sidestepped the issue entirely if they wanted to, but instead they decided to milk it for drama and then ignore it later creating some distubing implications. Naturally, getting humanity to accept that [[Fantastic Racism|rats are people too]] would have been difficult, and any effort on the part of main characters' towards this end would not be guaranteed to succeed, but it's downright upsetting that every major character spends the entire film entirely preoccupied with their trivial personal concerns [[It's All About Me|(I want to be a chef! I have a crush on my coworker! An excellent restaurant is about to go out of business!)]] with nary a thought for the ethical considerations of the deeply horrific discoveries they make during that timeframe . Besides, when important concerns that arise from the premise organically are being pushed aside to make way for less important, more contrived conflicts, that's just plain bad writing.
******* Okay, in response to the above, a real life comparison. By the 1940s Louis Armstrong was recognised as the one of the greatest Jazz musicians/singers and entertainers in show business, able to command huge audiences of both whites and blacks. Yet it was still necessary for Martin Luther King to lead a civil rights movement for blacks by 1963. Now should we criticise Louis Armstrong for not doing more to fight for racial equality and 'selfishly' persuing his dream of being a jazz musician. Or should we recognise that his finally achieving his dream ''despite'' extreme prejudice is a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] and, incidently, doing something to push the door open for more of his people to achieve equality.
******** Comparision doesn't hold up for a number of reasons. Firstly: Remy hid his identity, and thus did nothing to 'open the door' for more rats who might have wanted to follow their dreams in human society. Armstrong might have been chiefly motivated by the desire to make great music, but if he'd bleached his skin and pretended to be white in order to play in white clubs, we'd likely not hold that up as his finest hour. Secondly: Remy and Linguini were in a rather [[With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility|unique position to improve the condition of ratkind]], what with Remy's human communication skills, and Linguini being (at least as far as he knew) ''the only'' human to know of the sentience of rats. It's one thing to choose cooking over the crusade for social justice, but it's entirely another when the means to make a good run at [[Big Damn Heroes|saving an entire sapient species]] falls into your lap and choose to ignore it because you had [[I Just Want to Be Normal|less important things planned for yourself]]. Thirdly: there were in fact supporters of the civil rights movement who were disappointed with Armstrong's choice avoid offering the movement any public support. This, of course, does not make Armstrong any less of a jazz musician, but regardless of whether his choices were ultimately right or wrong, historical context does make his life story a ''little'' more complicated than what is implied by Ratatouille's Unambiguous Disney Happy Ending (and that's without the metaphorical skin bleaching).
** No. It's a cartoon. They're cartoon rats.
* Django actually makes a really good point - it may not be the most noble existence to live off garbage, but it isn't theft, either. Remy further undermines his own position by lecturing his father about how bad it is to steal, then turns around and proposes that they should swipe food out of the kitchen. And then tries to. And then despite having a moment of conscience when he's at the party, takes herbs from a rooftop garden for his omelette and doesn't show a shred of remorse. For all that he's supposedly tormented by a rat's parasitical existence, he's pretty casual about it at times.
** This troper is guessing that Remy tries to justify his scavenging by thinking it's for the sake of his cooking skills. Remy has always come off as a somewhat self-centered but caring character.
** It's also not really one of those right-wrong arguments. The fact is, they're -both- right in different ways.
* What happened to all the other cooks after Gusteau's restaurant was closed? After they walked out on Linguini they were never heard from again.
** [[Main/Meta 4|This troper]] theorizes they simply found work elsewhere. With Gusteau's on their resumes, some restaurants would kill to have any one of them in the kitchen.
** They starved to death in the streets. And then Remy's family ate them.
** Now, now. It's just as possible that they repented and were rehired to work in Remy and Linguini's new restaurant.
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** Well, what would you have them do? Remy whispering in Linguini's ear? Biting him? When your two protagonists can't communicate, there's really only so many ways you do things without getting even more contrived. Moreover, it's an extension of what people do in real life - those moments in movies where two people become close when one person is showing someone else how to do something and touches them to do so. And considering the the movie starts out with an old lady shooting out her ceiling with a shotgun, shouldn't a little comedy be okay?
*** A little comedy is always okay, but the hair pulling thing was essential to the plot, yet physically impossible, and never explained or even directly discussed in the script. It's just there, as though it logically flows from the premise, which it doesn't. It's a flaw. I'm inclined to agree it was lazy, too.
**** It's a cartoon. Physically impossible doesn't matter.
*** It bugged me also. Yes, it's a movie about an intelligent rat who can cook. Ok, so a ground rule of this story universe is that rats are smarter and can cook, that's fine, it's nice and self-contained. But I also have to accept that this human (as someone else wondered, ''only'' this human?) can be controlled like a marionette just by pulling his hair, ''even when he's sound asleep''? [[Willing Suspension of Disbelief]] pushed too far now, sorry. Yes, they really could have come up with something better. For example, let Remy still pull his hair, but make it more obvious that they are ''learning to coordinate'' not that Remy is just pulling his strings - literally. A little trial and error and Linguine learns that a tug "here" means "no you need to pick that thing up in front of you" and a tug "there" means "move this hand over there" and this means "stir faster" or "slower" ... etc. And yes, I'm holding Pixar up to the standard that they ''could'' have come up with something better than this - I mean, look at the ''amazing things'' they ''have'' effortlessly gotten us to believe. It's not so much unbelievable as it just seems uncharacteristically sloppy of Pixar to just sort of toss this into the movie with no real explanation and expect us to roll with it.
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** It's probably [[Translation Convention]] at work. The reality is that Remy's name probably ''isn't'' Remy, given that rats can't pronounce the sounds necessary for that to be a name. More likely his name is some collection of rat noises that either sound somewhat similar to Remy, or have roughly the same meaning.
** [[Fridge Brilliance]]: It is not like Linguini had the money to own a computer. Perhaps the restaurant has a computer, but it would not have been possible for Remy to use it without getting noticed.
* This is a minor niggle- silly because it'd get in the way of the wall-to-wall happy ending- but why wasn't Colette more bothered that her entire relationship with Linguini was based on a lie? It's effectively Cyrano with a rat.
** She didn't fall in love with him for his cooking skills - if that was what she went for in a guy, there were already plenty around for her to choose from - but for his sweet, shy personality, incurable romanticism, etc. (Remember the line, "I thought you were different"?) Additionally, we don't know how long it was between the big reveal and the opening of her and Remy's restaurant. When she returned to Gusteau's at the climax, she's still pretty ticked at him, but there could have been months in which they managed to patch up their relationship.
*** I understand that, but surely she would be annoyed she'd put all that time and effort into coaching him, only to find ''Remy'' was the one taking her tuition on board? Also, it had taken years for her to get where she was, while Linguini simply got lucky. A real girl would quite naturally feel bitter. Lastly, relationships founder without trust. Yes, he'd tried to tell her, and it's mainly Remy's fault that he didn't, but would you really expect her to believe the rat called all the shots?
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* What bugs me is what will happen to Linguini and Collette's restaurant a couple years down the road. Considering just how many rats are born within a single litter, and the environment which they are in protects them from any type of natural selection, there will soon be thousands of rats living there. And then what will happen when Remy dies (rats don't live very long after all) and the rest of the rats all decide to abandon his ideology?
** Perhaps Remy had children of his own who he passed on everything he knew. Even if they didn't inherit his sense of smell, they could still learn all of is techniques (which he'd probably make notes of). Plus, he was also telling Collette how to modify the recipes and she would surely remember them. As for the huge numbers of rats, not all of the rats in the film ended up working there, didn't they? Some seemed to just be diners. There would probably be rat children who would decide to go off on their own early in life.
** Also, since Django seems to only have two children, maybe we can assume that rats in this universe have more human-sized families, meaning the clan's population won't grow quite so insanely.
* This is a minor complain, but it bugs me, that Ego lost his reputation and job as a food critic after it was revealed that the restaurant had a rat infestation. Sure it was better for him when looking back how gloomy and cynical he used to be before the movie's events. The thing is, (that even if he kinda deserved it because driving Gusteau to commit suicide) that Ego never actually did anything wrong and therefore didn't deserve to be 'fired'. He came, ate and made his review like professional. It wasn't his fault that there were rats, and given the success of the new restaurant, he never admitted knowing that there were indeed rats, so he couldn't have been accused because of hiding information (And if Linguini wouldn't have revealed the secret how he would have known?). In other words, there were no fair reason given why he lost his job. It was just plainly mean.
** Well Ego was known as a particularly nasty critic, so there were probably a lot of people who didn't like him and thus leaped at the chance to discredit him. After all, it's not like there aren't people in real life who are blamed and laughed at for things that aren't their fault. Even if Ego wasn't mocked universally, it still would only take a bit to bring him down. Plus, he was known for being extremely meticulous. As a result, people who actually respected him would probably be let down since they would imagine that he would be able to tell if food was prepared in an infested kitchen (it wasn't just like there were one or two rats in there and none of the complainers would have known that Remy had his family keep clean). Given that Remy seemed to change Ego's outlook on life, he probably didn't work too hard to overturn these complaints or rebuild his reputation. After all, it was true that the restaurant had a lot of rats in it and he would have seen nothing to apologize for.
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* One of Horst's explanations for why he was in jail was "I created a hole in the ozone over Avignon." Would that actually be a crime? What could they possibly charge him with?
** Reckless Endangerment (or the French equivalent) comes to mind.
** "[[Monty Python and
* It is stated that Gusteau's was a five star restaurant. Upscale French rating only has three stars.
** Gusteau's was just ''[[Broke the Rating Scale|that good]]''.
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** Gusteau wasn't married. He wasn't even in a relationship. His relationship with Linguini's mother wouldn't have caused much of a stir, especially considering French (and European attitudes) towards sex.
** Maybe she lied about who his father was and didn't want him to know the truth immediately. I mean, he had just lost his mother. She may have been trying to give him some time to process it before the second whammy - "I know who my dad really is but he's already dead" - hits.
** There is absolutely a clear-cut answer to what he should have done. "Linguini, there is something your mother never told you and didn't want you to know. But it would have a big affect on your future and you probably have a right to know. Do you want me to tell you, or do you want to respect her wishes?"
* Is it ever actually explained precisely ''why'' Ego because the creepily cadaverous, cruel, [[Caustic Critic]] he did? For me, the whole "he's not such a monster, really" thing falls a bit flat if they didn't explain why, then, he was acting like one.
** Maybe he is creepy and harsh, but that doesn't mean he's a horrible person.
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[[Category:Pixar (Creator)/Headscratchers]]▼
[[Category:Ratatouille]]
[[Category:Headscratchers]]
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