Daisoujou’s review published on Letterboxd:
You know, a couple reviews ago I was writing about The Passion of Joan of Arc and how films can help us understand parts of humanity that we wouldn't have access to otherwise. And now, thanks to louferrigno's excellent Letterboxd bottom 250 list, I've discovered and viewed Ratatoing. Occasionally I just get a compulsion to watch something terrible -- maybe it helps to put the small miracles we take for granted in films into perspective. For every 20 things I complain about a mediocre or bad movie doing wrong, there are 100 baseline things that it is doing correctly. It's nice to remind myself what happens when so much goes wrong that it's amazing that the creators even managed to successfully film something and release it.
Enter Ratatoing. When stealing in art, it's best to find something very obscure to prevent the word from getting out, so the creators have wisely copied... Academy Award winner Ratatouille. Only here it's less interesting, because the rat runs a restaurant for all rats. Of course, calling the monstrosities rats is pretty generous. They're hardly animated, vaguely flapping their jaws with their terrible teeth and tongues floating in the middle of their mouth-void. Their walking is a weird diagonal slide while their legs just bounce up and down. And they have the rat equivalent of bone titties. See, the male rats just look like round little rats. You know, men are default and normal. But the female rats, they sure are shapely in a vaguely humanoid way. They also have hair, which the male rats lack outside of the occasional mustache. Because women rats need to be separated from normal rats. You can see this all the time when people anthropomorphize creatures. Surely there is nothing about gender attitudes hidden in there.
There's also just no sense of space. We cut from rat to rat, in a generic restaurant background, and it feels like it takes place outside of normal geometry. Eventually there is a long sequence against a white backdrop. Fuck, might as well. The dialog is repetitive and dreadful, telling us over and over that this is the greatest restaurant ever. The put on fancy voices are grating and a surreal nightmare dance sequence genuinely horrified me... I mean, you get the point, right? Ratatoing. It's Ratatoing. I can stop, right? I had some morbid fun but it also hurt. Gonna be honest, it got super hard to pay attention to. This thing is an eyeball and ear repeller.
There's something here about capitalism pitting rat restaurants against each other in a way that they resort to sabotaging each other -- maybe critiques of capitalism land well when made from a straight up rip off movie that, by its own existence, is doing its own part in showing how tying art to economic viability stifles creativity. Of course... it's fun to make those leaps, but then I'd have to believe the creators of Ratatoing are capable of making something worthwhile. Let's just say I have my doubts.