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>From the issue dated October 19, 2007
OBSERVER
Animated Animal Discourse
By RANDY MALAMUD
I find that lately when I'm at the movies with my kids I'm more hopeful
than usual about the possibility that human beings might be moving toward
a better relationship with the other living creatures in our world.
Ratatouille is the most recent movie that makes me think Hollywood can
help inspire Americans to improve our ecological sensibilities. It's a
feeling I've had often over the last few years, while watching Chicken
Run, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, Antz, Madagascar, and Happy Feet, among
others. In a culture that generally treats animals as subservient, these
movies represent their characters with an integrity that invites viewers
to value animals' rights, emotions, desires, and family and social
networks.
To put it bluntly, I couldn't imagine better propaganda for my cause if I
created it myself. I work in the disciplines of anthrozoology, or
human-animal studies, and ecocriticism, which resituates the natural world
from the margins and backdrops of our cultural expressions, decentering
"man as the measure of all things" and attending to the entire range of
life. I believe our ideologies and actions as a species are increasingly
dangerous to other animals. Part of the problem is how we think about
animals or worse, fail to think about them at all, simply going about our
business as if we were the planet's only living inhabitants.
So these films hearten me when they show that animals have stories and
experiences as important and as interesting as our own. We are invited to
come close, to understand that animals' lives are intermingled with our
own and that our prosperity is ultimately interdependent with theirs.
We're all in this together.
Ratatouille is especially radical in terms of its depiction of the
human-animal relationship. Its conceit, obviously, is absurd. Remy, a rat
with a gift for culinary brilliance, dreams of working in the famous
Parisian restaurant that had flourished under the late great chef Auguste
Gusteau. Remy was inspired by Gusteau's book, Anyone Can Cook. The great
thing about Ratatouille is that "anyone" isn't limited to people.
With the assistance of a human pal, Linguini - a menial kitchen worker who initially resists but eventually cooperates -
Remy fulfills his dream, and the interspecies duo collaborate in what
becomes a stunningly successful enterprise. At first the rat is very much
a silent partner, but eventually Linguini, determined to give his furry
friend due credit, reveals Remy's role in the operation. In the end, with
just a small deception necessary to fool the rodent inspectors, the heroes
create a brilliantly innovative restaurant staffed by hundreds of rats.
It's a wonderful story, full of complex characters (human and nonhuman),
ironies, tensions, and comedy. But beyond that it has a potent allegorical
kick. Remy's character has an emotional and moral depth that we rarely
acknowledge in animals. Animals probably don't really have burning desires
to cook in upscale restaurants, but they certainly have strong feelings
about other things, whether or not we can figure out what they are, so a
movie like this is a good vehicle for helping us realize the importance of
attributes that people aren't inclined to notice in other species.
Ratatouille explores the limitations of the human animal, and the
necessity that we work with other creatures. With Remy's help, Linguini
achieves a triumph that he couldn't have accomplished without the rat's
collaboration. And Remy, too, accomplishes something that no rat could
have done without human help. Ecologically, this message is more than just
important, it is the central truth, and one that our culture is pretty
good at sublimating in a fantasy that Homo sapiens reigns over all the
dumb creatures splayed beneath us on a Great Chain of Being.
The food that Linguini and Remy offer up is so good precisely because the
creative forces behind it are not the same ol' human-white-male-French
chefs who churned out pate after pate in the past. The hegemonic tradition is stale and exhausted, and can be
recharged only by a multicultural infusion of the previously marginalized
subalterns
it's the usual postmodern/postcolonial manifesto, except Ratatouille
expands the concept of diversity to include animals.
The cooking scenes are especially dazzling. Hiding under Linguini's toque,
Remy pulls the young man's hair to direct his hand movements, generating a
choreographic tour de force with knives swirling, zucchinis flying through
the air, herbs and spices wafting into soups, wines and sauces coursing
sumptuously across the screen. The exotic bounty reflects the
transcendence of the collaboration.
Both Linguini and Remy are initially reluctant to acknowledge to the other
members of their own species how important this enterprise is to them, and
how much they need the other, but when they finally do it is a glorious
epiphany. Animals and people interact in ways that would until recently
have been proscribed by our anthropocentric prejudices. Of all animals,
rats are depicted as smart, sympathetic, engaging creatures who
as long as they wash their little paws before cooking
are perfectly congruous with high culture and haute cuisine. The bond of
trust and friendship between a man and a rat forcefully deconstructs our
conventional dominionist model toward animals.
At the end of the movie, all's right with the world as a direct
consequence of the ecologically inspired affiliation between man and rat.
Linguini's romance flourishes, an evil chef is destroyed, a bitter critic
is redeemed, and Paris enjoys a new level of gourmet ecstasy. In a
different style from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth but with a similar
point, Ratatouille promotes our need to take seriously the claims and the
virtues of the world beyond ourselves. On our own, we will stagnate (just
as Gusteau's restaurant had for years). To save ourselves, to move
forward, we need to look at life as a joint enterprise. We need to revise
our misconception that the rest of the world exists simply for our
benefit, and deflate our presumptuous, hubristic fantasies that we stand
above the rest of nature.
Animated animals of the past were dimwitted, inarticulate, blustery
clowns: stuttering pigs bumbling around half-clothed; not-so-wily coyotes
getting creamed by anvils around every turn; a two-dimensional panorama of
loony, daffy sadism and buffoonery, as offensive in its own way to the
animal subjects as Amos 'n' Andy was to African-Americans.
Today's breed of animal characters are well rounded, sympathetic,
individualized, sophisticated. They are drawn and conceived with a keen
sensitivity to their habitats: Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse zipped around
in planes, trains, and automobiles, not to mention the occasional
submarine or hot-air balloon, but contemporary animated animals actually
inhabit nature. Sure, Remy enters into the mainstream human world, but
it's important that his native milieu (sewers, attics, garbage dumps) is
established first. The oceans in Finding Nemo, the green leafy meadows in
A Bug's Life, the glaciers in Happy Feet all exhibit a devout attention to
habitat, which counters one of the most dangerous aspects of how our
culture traditionally represents animals, alienating them from their
contexts. Such detachment erroneously implies that we can "have," and
frame, and experience, these animals in ways that are comfortable to us,
while their habitats (which we desecrate mercilessly) are expendable,
irrelevant.
These movies address a range of ecological challenges. Chicken Run depicts
birds in the desperate throes of agribusiness, awaiting the dark moment
when they are to become chicken pies. The injustice of factory farming is
conveyed from the chickens' point of view, by their sense of a better life
outside the compound and their clear, passionate desire for such a life.
Banding together with determination and intelligence, they learn to fly so
they can escape from the greedy, cruel humans. Happy Feet portrays
people's damage to animals and their habitats, and animals' consequent
suffering. The penguins are experiencing famine as a result of
overfishing, and our pollution is drifting down all the way to Antarctica.
Mumble, the hero, informs people that we need to attend to what the
animals have to "say" and treat them better. That movie ends,
idealistically, with an array of international governments resolving to
reform their ecological exploitation.
Bee Movie, a DreamWorks production scheduled to open in November, seems
like a movie in the same mold. Like Happy Feet, it focuses on people's
heedless plundering of the animals' world. A bee, like Remy, has
aspirations beyond the conventional. "Shocked to discover that the humans
have been stealing and eating the bees' honey for centuries," he sues.
Moviegoers may be entitled to a laugh. But they'll be animated, once
again, to question their broader sense of entitlement.
Randy Malamud is a professor of English at Georgia State University. His
books include Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (Palgrave, 2003) and Reading
Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York University Press,
1998).
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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 54, Issue 8, Page B5