Re: Enchanted, Ratatouille
Thanks for the review of Enchanted — that’s exactly what I was afraid it would be like.
I remain uneasy about Ratatouille. I thought the end was great, and the beginning was dull (although my 10-year-old son loved it). But mostly I got angry at there being an illegitimate main character. Yes, these people were French, but couldn’t they have had a short marriage, or a wife who sacrificed her husband to fame, or something? I really resent that a Disney film has a paternity test as a major plot point. And I have not seen this mentioned anywhere else.
Regarding Ratatouille, I appreciate your concern about Linguini’s parentage. Ratatouille may be Pixar’s oldest-skewing film yet, but it’s still a family film — and this is precisely the kind of thing that often does bug me about a family film even when it doesn’t seem to bother anybody else.
In this case, though, I think it’s far enough offscreen not to be a significant issue for me. I’m not even sure I would prefer it if Gusteau and Linguini’s mother had been briefly married — morally that might be preferable, but pedagogically I suspect that the broken-marriage motif is possibly a stickier wicket than the more minimal issue of Linguini not knowing who his father is.
It also helps, I think, that Linguini’s mother is never seen and Linguini himself is grown, so there’s no onscreen single parenting of a small child or anything. Ultimately, I suspect it’s more likely to bother parents than to confuse children.