“Kind of a strange message for kids.” –Susan
Rats in the kitchen? That’s adorable. Really, we shouldn’t be so prejudiced against rats. Is that what we’re saying here, Pixar?
No. Of course not.
The real message must be that anyone can be great, regardless of their background. But wait, the script specifically states something along the lines of: “Not anyone can be great, but greatness can come from anyone.”
Gone are the days of telling American children that they can be whatever they want to be. The new message is that you might not be able to be great, but anyone else might be. Even if it’s a rat who wants to be a chef. Is that it? It doesn’t matter how hard you try or how qualified you are, some lucky bastard off the street could slip into line and take your job at any time? You might have to shrug and just accept the fact that you don’t have the natural talent to make your dreams come true or to be the best? That might be accurate, but come on, is that an important moral for kids right now? Let them worry about that crap when they’re thirty and need to find a real job.
OK, so the rat was a good cook, and we should ignore the fact that he crawled up out of the sewer, has no training, no food handlers license, and probably carries diseases. I can respect that in the light of Disney fairytales (after all, rats have sewn beautiful ball gowns in couture style for as long as I can remember… or were those mice?). Cooking is an art, not tied to education so much as natural talent (I’ll have to take their word on that, I hate cooking). But then there’s this scene where all the other rats, untalented rats, completely take over the kitchen. Hundreds of them. Only the one an artiste. Really, it’s hard to find the underlying message through the thick grime of surface story that reminds us all not to make snappy judgments about rats touching our food.
I fear the Taco Bells of the next generation.
Hey, so I finally saw this movie, and it was pretty cool! The scary-face bunny kinda creeped me out, and I had to wash the movie down with an episode of Arrested Development to ensure that I didn’t have evil bunny nightmares, but otherwise I really liked it.
Imagine this scene: You’re lounging in the shade of a palm tree, looking out across the white sand beach and admiring the contrast of the deep green sea against the vivid blue tropical sky. You close your eyes for just a second, and magnified in your ears is the sound of the gentle sea lapping the beach, seagulls calling in the distance, and–even further still–the crash of waves as they hit the reef at the edge of your vision. You open your eyes again, and gaze up at the lazy white puffy clouds in the sky. Clouds that serve only to ornament your view and carry no threat of rain or darkness. You consider those perfect clouds, and you wonder: what would those clouds taste like?