With Ratatouille, Brad Bird and Pixar have set a new standard once again for 3D animation and storytelling. They offer the most beautiful eye candy yet in CGI. All images © Disney Enterprises Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios.

With Ratatouille (opening June 29, 2007), Brad Bird and Pixar have set a new standard once again for 3D animation and storytelling. The premise about a French rat that aspires to be a chef is deliciously absurd and imaginative, with enough twists and turns for -- you guessed it: a French farce. The attention to detail is remarkable (check out their little beating hearts whenever they get excited). What's more, Ratatouille offers the most beautiful eye candy yet in CGI, between the romantic depiction of Paris, the mouth-watering cuisine and the expressive rodents. It's about as original and sublime as you can get these days, and the most wonderful thing is that you often forget you're watching animation during this loving tribute to cooking, art and innocence.

"One of the wonderful things about this premise," Bird observes, "is that rats are death to a restaurant and a restaurant is death to rats -- and so this ups the ante on both sides and is ripe for animation that thrives on the mother's milk of caricature."

Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), of course, is no ordinary rat. Rather than settling for his trash-heap existence with the rest of his colony, he has cultivated a sophisticated sense of taste and smell and dreams of cooking haute cuisine. Remy gets his wish when his life is turned upside down and he's paired with a hapless garbage boy named Linguini (voiced by production designer Lou Romano) at Paris' most famous restaurant through a series of improbable deceptions.

"Originally, when I got here, [the rats] looked more like humans and their arms were toward their sides. At some expense, I had them go in and make the rats move on all fours and have their muscles work correctly." Thus, a whole year's worth of modeling was scrapped to make the rodents more rat-like but still appealing.

"There's a huge amount of engineering that goes into building these characters so the animators can use them," Bird continues. "We observed a couple of real rats for a year. One of the things we wanted to do that was real important is that when Remy gets on two legs, it's a choice to emulate humans. He has reasons for doing that. It makes it a story point and visually separates him from the other rats. If you understand the real behavior of rats, you can deviate from it with knowledge."

A lot of engineering and research went into building the characters. Here's concept art that was used.

With only nine months to animate, since Bird was plucked from the Pixar story brain trust to replace Jan Pinkava, supervising animator Mark Walsh says they took advantage of the shoot-from-the-hip predicament. As a result, there was more spontaneous energy on Ratatouille than on any previous Pixar feature. "From what I observed, the first creative instinct is what ended up on screen," Walsh confirms. "And Brad will be the first to admit that he couldn't afford to be a perfectionist on everything. So he leaned on the animators to bring their perfection to the table. He was writing the story while directing it, so it really empowered the crew. I think it was different for Brad and it was different for us. "

In fact, according to Walsh, there were even tweaks made to a few scenes after they were animated, including the courtyard exchange between Linguini and feisty chef Colette (voiced by Janeane Garofalo), and the disturbing encounter between Remy and his father outside the exterminator's office. A couple of animators sent Bird an email questioning his choices, and, later, in front of the group, Bird announced that they were redoing a scene, thanks to a great note.

"With Brad, it's all about the idea," Walsh continues, "and he's really great at explaining the significance of whatever you're doing to the overall story no matter how small it is. This was definitely the most difficult animation to date. You have so many extremities: whiskers and ears and tails. This was the first film where we relied on master rigs that we applied to other characters. It used to be that we would do each character separately, for the most part. But, when you have a whole colony of rats, we were able to drag and drop a skeletal rig and then clean it up quickly.