ReeRay1

Pixar hired a chef with three Michelin stars to design the dish in Ratatouille. Then they built the scene around the neuroscience of how taste triggers memory, and got Peter O’Toole to deliver one of the great monologues in animation history. What you call “taste” is mostly smell. When you eat, molecules rise up the back of your throat into your nose. From there, smell takes a unique route. Every other sense (sight, sound, touch, even the actual taste your tongue picks up) gets filtered through a kind of switchboard in your brain first. Smell skips it. The smell heads straight to the parts of your brain that handle memory and emotion. Which is why one bite of food can drop you back into a moment from 30 years ago. Ratatouille’s director, Brad Bird, built the entire flashback around this. Anton Ego takes one bite, and Pixar zooms the camera through his pupil into a childhood kitchen. The dish itself was Thomas Keller’s. His restaurant The French Laundry in California has three Michelin stars. He took a 1976 recipe by French chef Michel Guérard called confit byaldi (paper-thin vegetables spiraled over a tomato-pepper sauce) and adapted it for the film. Keller even had Pixar’s producer intern in his kitchen for months to get the look right. Anton Ego is voiced by Peter O’Toole, the lead in Lawrence of Arabia. He was nominated for Best Actor eight times. Never won. He holds the record (tied with Glenn Close) for most nominations without a win, and once called himself the Academy’s “Biggest Loser.” He was 75 when he recorded the Anton Ego monologue. He died six years later, and it became one of his signature performances. The speech was Brad Bird’s. In the review he writes the next morning, Anton Ego turns on his own profession. Critics risk almost nothing, he writes. They thrive on tearing strangers apart. The only risk that matters, he writes, is defending new talent when no one else will. He ends with the line everyone still quotes: “a great artist can come from anywhere.” Ratatouille won Best Animated Feature at the 2008 Oscars, plus a Best Original Screenplay nomination on the strength of Bird’s speech. The film grossed $624 million on a $150 million budget. In 90 seconds, a cartoon rat and a fictional food critic turn that science into something you can feel. Your best memories live in your stomach.