Jan Pinkava
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Not always. Do you happen to make a nice ratatouille? Yeah, I've made ratatouille before, but I don't have the skill, taste and feeling to make a great ratatouille. The thing is, it's just a bunch of vegetables, right? Well, yes, but no. Yes, but no, exactly. And that's the thing. Ratatouille as a theme and a title for the film, that was there from the beginning for a number of reasons.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
I came up with the original idea and wrote a treatment, came up with the name Ratatouille and the basic bones and outlines of the concept and the story. And then co-wrote a script with Jim Capobianco. And there were many versions of the script with various people on the way, as is always the case. And we began developing the movie.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
His name was Tony Antonin, and he was a very serious man. He was the first of ten children, the son of a village cobbler, and he had perfect grades at school. He was an engineer who designed railway engine braking systems. He was a man who had a hard life. When he did something, he did it seriously. So when he played chess, he would take as long as it took to make the next move.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
And that's how he won a lot of games, by boring the other side to death. But when he was playing with himself, he would just stare at the board and just keep on thinking and thinking and thinking as far and deeply as he could until he could make the move he wanted. And then he turned the board around. And then he... Did it again. Did it again.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
I'm pitching to John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter and Joe Ranft, the head of story, and Ed Catmull, the head of the studio. These are just the early concepts for a film. One of the ideas was, oh, this is a story about a rat who wants to become a chef. Everyone laughs. Everyone gets it. You're sold. The idea had come to him at home while he and his wife were in the kitchen.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
You know, how can a rat become a chef? You can immediately see the central problem of the story right there. It is obviously a disaster. And it's going to be funny if you can make it work. But the making it work part would be difficult. We were developing this film for quite a while. You're working on story, you're working on designs, characters, scenes, environments, and so on.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
We did several versions of the story reel. Story reel is drawings edited with sound and music to basically be a movie you can watch in the form of drawings. That's how an animated film is prototyped. It's a way of making the movie before you've made the movie, because in animation, you do not want to cut animation out.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Yeah, and because you're creating everything. You're making a whole world come to life artificially. Every blade of grass, every gesture of the character, somebody has put a lot of work into it. This film had a longer gestation period. By the time it was made, it was six years into it.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
We worked on it, had a bunch of versions in making a movie like that. It goes up and down. You're continually changing. One of the wonderful things that everyone should remember and understand is that Pixar didn't happen because of computer graphics. Pixar happened because of story.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
At least half the effort on any one of these movies, at least half, is story, story, story, story, and making sure that the thing that's being made is an appealing, engaging story with characters that you care about that really makes sense to an audience. We got into the character development and the designs and the environments, the kitchen, being in Paris and so on.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
And it involved also some fabulous experiences of research. That's a thing that Pixar is famous for, getting in-depth research to feed the process of making the movie authentic. We ended up going twice to Paris to dine in the finest restaurants and meet with the chefs. The artist has to suffer, right? You have to do your work.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
We spoke to a bunch of people with different attitudes to rats. For instance, I remember the national president of the Rat Fanciers Association of the United States, the people who like to keep rats as pets. She was wonderful. She was really insightful and knowledgeable about who rats are as characters, real rats.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
One of the lovely things she told us was, there's the old cliche that dogs look up to you and cats look down on you. If you have a rat as a pet, that's a peer-to-peer relationship. A rat looks you in the eye and doesn't feel inferior or superior. It's just, you are like me. I'm like you. That's so interesting. Do you believe that to be true? You know, she certainly has that expertise, definitely.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
One of the things that makes it believable to me is that in the history of organized human life, rats have been right there with us all along. What else did you learn about rats? Biologically, they have some interesting traits, like rats are incontinent. They don't know when to not do it. That's just being a rat, right? You poop and pee whenever.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
So actually keeping a real rat on your head would not be such a good idea.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
No, no, I didn't seem to have a good story point there for our main character, the guy in the kitchen doing the cooking, to be doing that too much.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Yeah. I was around a long part of the way, not right to the very end, and that's normal for the film industry. I was a first-time feature director coming up with an idea and getting it made, which in the grand scheme of things is a pretty great result. And I have tremendous respect for Brad Bird as a writer and director.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
And he took great pains when it was time to take over to talk to me and the crew and especially to sit down and listen to what my intentions had been making the story and what I was hoping for and to really understand where the whole thing came from and what it meant so that he could then take it his way, which you have to do as a director.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
So overall, I'm really very happy and grateful that it turned out to be such a successful movie.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
I'm now here in Germany, of all places, at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg in the Animation Institute. What is the primary mission? Is it education? Is it outreach? It's filmmaking. It's very much learning by doing. It's about let's make movies and fail miserably sometimes and succeed wonderfully sometimes. There's very little sitting and cogitating and theorizing and philosophizing.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
It's about practical doing and a lot about working together because the bigger the project, the more of a team sport filmmaking is.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you did. If you've got to do it, you've got to do it. You'll figure out a way somehow.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
really to help us get along with each other. There are lots of beautiful examples of stories like this. Billy Elliot, for instance, that's about a minor son in 1980s strike-ridden Northern England who has to figure out how to be a ballet dancer, which is the most unmanly thing he can possibly be doing in the middle of this. So in a way, Ratatouille is like ballet dancing with Nazis.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
We're not only doing the thing you're not supposed to be doing, you're doing it with people who are ready to kill you as soon as they see you. I was immediately drawn to the character of Remy as stuck between these two worlds. You know, he's going somewhere where he cannot possibly be, the kitchen where everyone just... from the get-go, hates him, will kill him.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
And on the other side, he's betraying his people, his family. He wants to work with the enemy, with the people who will kill us if they see us. So he's stuck there on his own. Ratatouille as an idea, as a story, it's an allegory. What's it about, really? It's not about rats and cooking. It's about prejudice. It's about...
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Overcoming the limitations imposed on you by misrepresentation, by misunderstanding. It's about racism, sexism, everything. All those different forms of prejudice in the form of a rat cooking story.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Well, it's always been a slur to call someone a rat. That's an epithet that's used to paint them as the other, the thing that you should hate and kill and push away. Any story that sees the world from the perspective of the shunned and the hated is hopefully gives us an opportunity to open up our feelings for each other.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Well, Django, the father, he has a point, right? Everything the world tells him is he's right. There's no arguing against him. Remy gets it. And you hope that the whole thing adds up to that moment when Remy finally has to come out. reveal himself as the cooking rat, step off that ledge with no one to catch him and take that ultimate risk with the risk of his own life. It's a real crisis.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
It's a life or death choice. And he chooses to be himself. And hopefully the story adds up to that feeling with the audience going, what will happen? How will this go? Because your job as a story writer is to get to that ending that really has to happen in the movie. There's only one way to end it. He has to find a way to be himself.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Yeah, he ends up being able to cook. That was always going to happen. And interacting with humans. Yeah, because there are some humans that he can interact with. The humans who care about cooking and who don't care who's doing the cooking because they recognize genius when they see it. What I do love is this
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
dramatized contrast of the world's attitudes to cooking and rats in one with ego the critic brad did a fantastic thing of casting peter o'toole which was one of his last roles and really a beautiful performance and this whole zoom into his childhood when he tastes the ratatouille and suddenly this cold cadaverous disappointed critic whose entire career has been
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
being judgmental, is returned to his early childhood in just one moment, and we feel for him.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
It's love, isn't it? The scene, if you remember, he's fallen off his bike and he's a kid. He's been crying. He's had a bad time. And his mother serves him this simple peasant dish. And through that shows her love for him. It's love.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
I hope it opens a door to just thinking differently about a species that you might otherwise just dismiss as a category. People want to put rats on their head in their imagination. That's something, right? That's a door opening to another way of thinking.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
Look, you put a mouse next to a rat. And you go, okay, who's the bad guy? It's a fairly easy choice because the rat's bigger, it's scruffier, it's got a longer nose, and it has that slightly disturbing bald tail. But these are all cosmetic differences. They are.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
They are. Now, what is wrong with us that we judge by appearances? That's a big question, isn't it, Jan? Yeah. I mean, do you have any solutions for that? Exposure. You've got to see the thing that you judge as other early in life as just there and it's okay. And what's your personal feeling today about rats? I think rats are a part of our life that we need to get used to.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
They are creatures in the world that have every right to be here. Okay.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
First of all, it's about rats and ratatouille. It tells you it's a comedy because it's a silly word. And ratatouille as the quintessential peasant dish, it's just vegetables, it's stuff that you can find easily. If you know how to cook it well, it's beautiful. I'm speaking here with Jan Pinkover. I worked on a couple of the early feature films of Pixar, including A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc.
Freakonomics Radio
624. The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do
and Toy Story 2. And I got a break to develop my own feature film.