Word: birde
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Charlie Chaplin and the other great silent-movie clowns knew how to express the deepest, subtlest emotions through gesture. Remy, too, in the hands of director Brad Bird and his gifted animators, is a veritable Shakespeare of shrugs. The suppleness with which Remy scoots through both human and rodent worlds lends Ratatouille the believability at the center of Pixar classics like John Lasseter's Toy Story, Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo and Bird's own The Incredibles...
...Bird, like the other Pixarians, is working from the Walt Disney playbook. "In a fantasy world where animals can talk, how do they talk? That's the secret of character animation. Even though it's a completely unbelievable thing, people invest in it," he says. "If we do our job on this one, audiences will empathize with, and invest in, a rat." That's because the creative children at Pixar's Lego- like headquarters in the San Francisco suburb of Emeryville realize that movies, and especially cartoons, are not just talking pictures. They are motion and emotion pictures...
This was to have been the first feature assignment for Pinkava, the Czech-born director of Pixar's Oscar-winning short Geri's Game. But after a few years, says Lasseter regretfully, "it was just not working out. The leadership and vision in the story were not there." Bird, who had been away from the Ratatouille meetings for a year, finishing The Incredibles, now inundated the group with appealing story ideas. Eventually, he took over the project, and Pinkava, who still receives story credit, left the company...
...market are what they try to ignore. The title, for one thing: it's pronounced rat-a-tooey and refers to a Mediterranean vegetable stew, which not everyone will know or, knowing, will care about. And then ... well ... rats. They are typically figures of fear and loathing, and the Bird team hasn't prettied them up. Though Remy's coat has a lovely bluish sheen, and he often walks on his two hind paws, he is recognizably a rat, much closer to his species than a certain Disney mouse--with red pants, white gloves and yellow shoes...
...Evangelicals circulate a letter on global warming and "creation care" as a moral imperative, or when megapastor Rick Warren addresses AIDS and poverty as moral issues, and says, when it comes to politics, "I'm not left wing, I'm not right wing, I'm for the whole bird." Warren cites Graham as his mentor; he has absorbed the lessons that reflected Graham's unprecedented and sometimes painful journey through the inner rings of power. There is a reason why, even now as he resides in peaceful twilight on his mountaintop in Montreat, North Carolina, Graham remains the leader evangelicals...