Ratatouille and Restaurants

This chapter uses scholarship on the post-revolutionary history of haute cuisine, French food, chefs, Parisian restaurants and kitchen culture, rats, and animal tales to envision Disney•Pixar’s Ratatouille not as a sunny story of alterity leading necessarily to a more egalitarian and inclusive future. The vermin signifier and extermination paradigms motivate the action through most of the movie; although at the end they are absent at Remy’s restaurant of interspecies detente, the movie does not portray a universal revolution of “separate but equitable” social spaces. Outside the restaurant, there is no indication that the social structure which produced the oppression and violence throughout most of the film has changed. Instead, Remy’s bistro is a space for ethical inquiry to engage in possibilities, where, within its limited space, a Bakhtinian dialogic persists between humans and animals to explore ways to live in harmony.