First public holiday of the month (APEC Week Fri 07/09). I should have realised that watching a children’s movie on a daytime is not such a good idea. The place to buy the tickets was on a different level than the actual cinemas were, so minie and I were not aware of the length of the queue just to get in to Cinema #6. The line was filled with kids, each parent had at least 2 around their hands, some had even 4! The chain created almost a full circle outside the theater – made me think that I was joining the wrong train as it went over to Cinema #2’s area. Suffice to look through the people in front of me, their eyes were obviously fixed on the rat.

The movie was a bit more than 2 hrs long, a lot longer than other children type of movies. It was witty, funny, and also a seriously lame cartoon 😀 It has all the ingredients of what a kid’s movie should be like: simple-and-deep meaningful message, lively characters, and a full bag of laughs.

The story started with Remy, a human-acting rat. Remy refused to walk using four extremities just like other rats do, he likes to keep his paws clean so he wouldn’t eat any dirt with his food, and he has an extremely sensitive smelling capability for cooking materials. As rats usually only eat garbage, his talent was only recognised as a rat poison detector. His dad forced him to smell all garbage which all the rats in the clan brought into their nest. Boring job alright, he wasn’t happy. Remy liked to watch Gusteau’s cooking show on the TV. Gusteau was a great 5 stars rating chef who passed away because of desperation after a food critique brought his rating down to 4 stars. The ghost then become Remy’s toothfairy who was always there to give advice (this is the first lame aspect of the movie).

Remy’s adventure started when he met Gusteau’s son Linguini. The son and Remy shared a mutual symbiosis by cooking together. Linguini didn’t know anything about cooking and Remy couldn’t cook without a human help (any appearance of rats in the kitchen was a big taboo, definitely a no no for the health inspectors). The rest of the story then followed on just like what you would expect in a children’s movie.

This movie reminded me of cooking animes such as Cooking Master Boy and Yakitate Japan. The sole lameness appear in its pure sense whenever there was a scene of people tasting the food. Once the food was bitten, the stars came into the room, the people were transferred through another world all together, unaware of their surroundings and started to act crazy. They began to change their act and their perspective in life as the food showed its power. It is that type of lame but I should stress that it is extremely enjoyable, I was laughing my arse off many times during the show, minie was screaming ‘help help help’ all the time after every hit of lameness.