For those of you who are unfamiliar with this particular cinematic masterpiece, I’ll give you a quick summary: Remy the rat finds himself shunned by his own kind because of his heightened senses and passion for food, but is also disregarded by humans because he is a rodent. In order to pursue his dream of becoming a chef, he and bumbling bumpkin Alfredo Linguini team up. Linguini needs Remy to cook for him and Remy needs Linguini to “uh, appear human.” By somehow using Linguini’s hair as a strange version of puppet strings, he is able to win the hearts of food critics and fellow chefs alike. Well, except for one person.
The beauty of this film isn’t only in its painfully relatable, witty, complex characters or its stunning animation. It isn’t even only because the soundtrack and script are dynamite. A lot of the movie’s quirky and lovable charm comes from the villains and challenges our tiny rat hero needs to face before he can have his happy ending.
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From the very first scene of the movie, they lead us to believe that France’s top food critic, Anton Ego, is going to be the biggest opponent Remy has to face. His office is shaped like a coffin, for Pete’s sake. His character design practically oozes evil. But then when you get to the end of the movie, you await that dreaded scene when Anton Ego attempts to take down this rat with a dream, only to find (spoiler alert) it never comes. To Ego, it turns out, Remy’s talent is the only proof necessary to convince him that Chef Gusteau was right all along.
Then who is the villain? Turns out, it’s Chef Skinner. And honestly, he’s one of those villains we should probably be scared of.
It’s not just because he personally orders Linguini to kill Remy—this is probably forgivable. He had no clue this rat had the potential to become the world’s next great chef.
What makes him such an abominable villain are some of his other actions throughout the movie, some we don’t even think about (when we actually should). He’s capitalizing on the death of a famous chef and his former mentor for his own personal gain. He isn’t willing to give Linguini a job in his kitchen even though he’s struggling, and his dead mother personally asked Skinner in a handwritten note. He can lose his temper with his staff at the drop of a hat. He gets Linguini drunk in hopes that he’ll spill some of his deepest secrets. In the climax of the movie, he kidnaps Remy and plans on forcing the tiny rat into creating a new line of “Chef Skinner Frozen Foods.”
Sure, Skinner doesn’t murder anyone. He doesn’t even intend on murdering anyone. (Except Remy, but he wouldn’t get tried in a court of law for that). But this character only proves that sometimes the villains who most mirror our real lives can be truly scary. We’ve all had a boss we’ve been afraid of approaching, someone who just won’t cut us any slack, someone who’s manipulative and unrelenting in the most mundane way possible. That’s the kind of person Skinner represents and that makes him terrifying. While dragons and wicked queens do not exist, Skinners do.
In the end, however, "Ratatouille" still teaches us that they can be defeated.
