High Art: The Beautiful Writing of Anton Ego in Ratatouille

Well, it certainly ain’t James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but Ratatouille, Pixar’s stellar computer animated film about a Rat’s quest to cook, has some great language capping the end of the film. The writer behind the food critic, Anton Ego, uses a turn of phrase and some self-analysis of a critic’s role that is both touching and enlightening. Of course, if you are an intellectual gatekeeper who likes Finnegan’s Wake, feels the need to sprinkle in French and Latin terms, presupposes a reader’s knowledge of Sartre and Camus, and pooh-poohs anything as low-brow as a popular animated film, read no further.

What follows is the text of what Anton Ego comes to realize in the end of Ratatouille. After spending a lifetime taking a cruel pleasure in proclaiming that very few people can actually cook and panning the careers of many, Ego (his telling name) is surprised to find that a simple Rat with a not so simple talent, can cook. He surmises in the sagacious voice of Peter O’Toole:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize that only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau’s, who is, in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau’s soon, hungry for more.

That kind of writing—pleasant, pointed, profound—can come from a cartoon or a child. Here’s another example. My daughter, who was trying to plead with me that she wanted to sleep in our bed, had a turn of phrase that struck me. She wasn’t trying to be poetic or profound, and yet she was. She looked at me through three-year-old teary eyes and said with utter sincerity, “I know how to wake up. I don’t know how to sleep!”

Oh, how many a night this is so. Waking is so easy, worry staving off sleep—the monster slyly opening the closet, the still undone school project due tomorrow, tomorrow night’s marriage proposal, and the teenage son who hasn’t returned home at 12:30 p.m.—now that sleep, as Macbeth testified, is more difficult.

She said it in a way that I couldn’t have. And some scratching on a yellow legal pad which became the voice on an animated character in a popular movie about a rat turned into more eloquence than has probably been seen in much of the rubbish of today’s “dramas.” This just goes to show you that not everyone can write, but good writing can come from anywhere.