&Ratatouille&: Making food look delicious

: JEFF HOUCK / Media General News Service
Published: June 29, 2007

Selling the idea of a rat who loves to cook gourmet food is easy.

Making the food look delicious and believable is hard.

Brad Bird knows this. As director of the new food-themed Pixar movie "Ratatouille," it was his job to make the objects depicted on-screen so realistic that the audience could concentrate on the story of a French rodent with a talent for cooking who succeeds despite the improbable odds.

For animators, that meant making sure the eye sees things it wants to eat.

"The weird thing is, if you didn't do that, people wouldn't know why it didn't look right," Bird said during a recent phone interview. "They would just say, 'Eh, there's something weird about that.'"

Animators studied the kitchen of noted Napa Valley chef Thomas Keller. They took cooking classes to understand techniques. They flew to France to understand the importance of cuisine to that country's culture. And, by using technology developed to make human skin look real instead of plastic in Bird's films "Finding Nemo" and "The Incredibles," Bird's crew was able to make something tiny, like a bunch of grapes, look, well, like a bunch of grapes.

"That was based on the thing that actually happens with real skin, where light penetrates the surface of the skin, hits blood vessels under the skin, bounces around and then glows back through the skin," Bird said. "That came into play when we did something like grapes. There is a luminescence to grapes. And if you don't do it, it's a very subtle effect, but it's the difference between wax fruit and something you'd want to eat."

During a promotional swing across the country last week, Bird discussed the film's other challenges.

First, I want to applaud you on the usual Pixar attention to realism on such things as the water beads on the rats' fur …

Uh, huh.

…and the coffin motifs surrounding food critic Anton Ego.

[laughs]

But I think you missed a chance to depict the accuracy of the kitchen staff's dependency on nicotine, verbal obscenities and alcohol.

[laughs] We'll have a special R-rated European version. It'll be coming out in a month.

That's what you were doing last week, right-

Yeah. We were digitally inserting all of the vices into the film.

That's the extended director's cut.

Yes. It starts out in Europe. Then when it gets a cachet, it will be released only among the bohemians in the United States.

It's going to be "Ratatouille: The South Park Edition."

That's It. Yeah.

Talk to me about how hard it was to make food look good.

It was actually really hard. Fortunately, a lot of the work was well under way by the time I came on board, which was a little over a year and a half ago. There was an extraordinary amount of effort. The kind of detail you had to go in was almost hilarious because very smart people were analyzing what it is about food that makes it look touchable and smellable and appealing.

It's not as simple as people would think. The computer wants to kind of do everything perfectly. It would love it if we made a movie about plastic cubes that were really clean and had no flaws on their surface. But all surfaces are uneven. They're a little worn. They have character to them. So we have to put that character in. Let's say you have a piece of salmon that's sitting on a bed of rice. The computer wants to put a perfect brick of salmon there, almost like it's a frozen piece of salmon. But actual meat kind of splays out just slightly and lays over the rice. That meant we had to do a simulation and place the food in there. We'd do a simulation of the effects of gravity, and the surface of the meat would compress a little bit and bump up against other food. It's subtle, but it's one of those things that tell you that it's soft.

You see some computer animation, and it looks like someone did a foam carving of a model, and that's what appears on screen. And when you're trying to depict anything organic, you can't do that if you want people to believe what it is you're trying to put across.

Right. All of this is in service of a really absurd story. If we can put in things that feel tactile and believable all around this absurd story, then people will come along with us.

It's funny you say that, because when I saw Remy making an omelet for Linguine, there's a way that it lays on the spatula that, first of all, I thought, "I can taste that in my mouth and I can smell what it smells like." There's a flexibility to the omelet. And then, the second thought I had was, "But that's a rat making an omelet!"

That's right. And when he picks it up, there are real physics in the way he's animated, because he has to lean back in order to counteract the weight of the omelet. It's like when a person uses one of those long nets to clean out a pool, there's a certain amount of weight on the pole and you'll lean back to counteract it. Well, a lot of people who do animation, and I won't name any names, a lot of the other studios don't observe real physics at all. Now, you don't have to adhere to real physics to make things react the way they do in real life, but if you use real physics in denying real physics, it makes it convincing to the eye.

I was always impressed when I was a kid at the animation in "Pinocchio." Here's a really unbelievable idea that a wooden puppet is going to come to life, and yet the animators, the geniuses - Walt Disney's "Nine Old Men" - they analyzed if somebody was absolutely brand new to the face of the Earth, how would they move. There's a sense of discovery that Pinocchio has toward everything around him. That really sort of unbelievable idea is made convincing because you're going, "If I was a wooden puppet and I was new to Earth, how would I experience the world-"

Has your appreciation for food changed as a result of doing the movie-

I was already on the road to it a little bit, but this really amped it up. I, fortunately, married a really good cook, and she kind of disabused me of certain things right away. "Oh no, you don't overcook the vegetables." My mom was actually the most wonderful lady on the face of the Earth, and I wouldn't change having her as a mom for anything, but she herself would admit that she was a terrible cook. The only thing she did well, ironically and hilariously, was apple pie. Because it was her mother's recipe, she did it very carefully. Everything else, she was like, "Geez, I have to do this thing again," and it had that quality to it. My wife, on the other hand is a really good cook so I was on the road to it. I appreciate a good restaurant. It's just amped up to a new level with this.

What was [chef] Thomas Keller's contribution to the film- I understand his plating of ratatouille is how it is depicted onscreen.

Yeah, we gave him the challenge of if you were going to do ratatouille, what would you do- He just said come on out. He didn't think about it, he just improved it. It was the first ratatouille I had seen that looked unbelievably delicious. It is the one we have at the end of the film. We filmed him doing it and mimicked it in the film. But he also was a consultant about the kitchen, and he allowed us to come and shoot footage of his cooks at work and watch him do his thing and interview him. He's actually a voice in the film, too.

Which one-

He's the first food snob, the one that says, "I know about the fois gras. Give me something new."

Do you cook at all-

No. I can do a nice omelet, but I really need to up my game. We had an amazing meal in Chicago yesterday with an up-and-coming chef.

It was enormously clever. We had a dessert that was all themed around the movies. It had popcorn that had a little seasoning salt and a little drizzle of chocolate underneath and a little bit of ice cream, and the weird thing was all these flavors totally reminded you of a million matinees that you've seen. There was salt and sweet and cold and wet and a little thing that was a less-sweet version of colas and it was … a "Fantasia." I had a moment like Ego has in the film where I was flashing back to all these movies I saw as a kid.

[For me] it reinforces that this is an art, and these guys are blending painting with flavors and smells and textures the way people paint with colors.

JEFF HOUCK is a staff writer for The Tampa Tribune