Film Screening: Au Menu—Ratatouille

Calling all young families and kids at heart! Join us for the January screening in our Au Menu film series, Pixar’s beloved 2007 animated comedy-drama Ratatouille!

Doors at 9:30 a.m., screening at 10:00. Snacks and children’s activities facilitated by AF-Chicago youth programs instructors will be available in the Eleanor Wood Prince Salon during and after the screening.

Set in Paris, Ratatouille follows the adventures of young rat Remy, who dreams of becoming a chef at Auguste Gusteau restaurant. He attemps to achieve his goal by forming an unlikely alliance with the restaurant’s garbage boy, Alfredo Linguini.

The film title refers to classic French dish ratatouille, as well as the murine main character’s species. And Ratatouille takes French cuisine seriously: writer and director Brad Bird and several of the film’s crew members visited Paris for inspiration and consulted French chefs to create the food animation used in the film. Producer Brian Lewis interned at The French Laundry restaurant, where Chef Thomas Keller developed the confit byalid, a dish featured in the film. The story is accompanied by Paris-inspired music composed by Michael Giaccino.

A critical and commercial success, Ratatouille received widespread acclaim for its screenplay, animation, humor, voice acting, and Giacchino’s score. It also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was later voted one of the 100 greatest motion pictures of the 21st century by a 2016 poll of international critics conducted by the BBC.

About the Director

Brad Bird is an American filmmaker, animator, and voice actor with a career spanning four decades in both animation and live-action. He attended the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s and went on to work for Walt Disney Productions. He later moved to Pixar where he wrote and directed two computer-animated films,* The Incredibles* (2004) and Ratatouille (2007) that were worldwide critical and financial hits; they earned him two Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature wins and Best Original Screenplay nominations.