The Brazilian Ratatouille Knock Off Ratatoing Lives Up To Its Reputation for Surreal Ineptitude

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

As one of the Control Nathan Rabin 5.0 choices for The Joy of Trash Kickstarter campaign, one of you glorious weirdoes forced me to experience a representative sampling of the craptastic majesty of Brazil’s Vídeo Brinquedo. 

They’re the bottom-feeding Asylum of South American animation with a cynical grift of a business model. The opportunistic parasites cranked out lookalike knock-offs of Pixar, Dreamworks and Disney animation for a dual audience of easily confused parents who can’t delineate between the real thing and a cheap imitation and parents who could not access quality studio animation and had to settle for whatever they could get. 

Redbox out of Pixar’s Cars? Then why not settle for Video Brinquedo’s The Little Cars in the Big Race? Kung Fu Panda rented out at the local video store? Don’t worry. As the meme goes, we’ve got The Little Panda Fighter at home instead. 

Video Brinquedo eventually went out of business, proving that you can, in fact, go broke underestimating the intelligence of the global public but not before blessing the world with such wonders as 2009’s What’s Up: Balloon to The Rescue (which may have been inspired by Pixar’s Up), Tiny Robots (a mash-up of WALL-E and Robots) and, of course, The Little Cars 3: Fast & Curious. 

The scrappy hustlers cut corners in every other conceivable other way as well. Their movies, or rather their “movies” are all just over forty minutes long, or just barely feature length and/or long enough to qualify for awards consideration. 

Awards consideration! How crazy is that? In what universe is The Little Cars 2: Rodopolis Adventure gonna shock the world with a surprise Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film? 

In order to squeak just past the forty minute mark the studio will slow things down for no other purpose than to run out the clock. The mesmerizingly terrible 2007 Ratatouille rip-off Ratatoing is about the culinary misadventures of a talking rat so it is perhaps fitting that it lazily borrows techniques from A Talking Cat!?! 

To kill time both Ratatoing and A Talking Cat!?! feature extensive sequences where characters walk or drive VERY slowly against bare backdrops or repeat actions unnecessarily in ways that do nothing to advance the plot or feature jokes or even dialogue. 

Ratatoing centers on professional competition among upscale anthropomorphic rodent eateries, subject matter uniquely unappealing to small children. 

my eyes! my eyes!

We open in an unnamed city that’s ostensibly a bustling metropolis yet is suspiciously almost completely devoid of rats or people.

Our hero Marcelle Toing has the hottest bistro in town. His competitors are so jealous that they’re convinced that they must destroy him in order to stand a chance of survival themselves. 

So they pursue the curious, deeply flawed strategy of eating at Marcelle’s pricey restaurant every night and angrily demanding to know the secret behind his delicious food. 

When he stammers and stutters before ultimately revealing that the secret to his cooking is dedication and care, these rodent sociopaths look like they want to murder him with their eyes for being so unhelpful. 

This is one of many elements that feels like it could be the product of a ten-year-old child’s imagination. I don’t want to be overly critical, but this famously idiotic Brazilian Pixar knockoff for undiscriminating children does not have a very nuanced understanding of the restaurant business or capitalism in general.

For example Marcelle is supposed to be a four star Michelin chef of the rat world but all he ever seems to do is stir the same stupid pot. Anthony Bourdain he is not. 

It turns out that Marcelle and his viscerally disturbing compatriots DO, in fact, have a secret. Under cover of night they put on spy gear and steal fresh ingredients from a human restaurant. 

This impresses their competitors. In a representative bit of dialogue they observe, “You should see their equipment! It reminds me of a James RAT movie.”

When our heroes put on their high tech equipment it’s against a completely white void, a vast nothingness. They forgot to include a background in multiple scenes and then just figured fuck it, nobody was going to notice. 

Ratatoing is undoubtedly painful in its original Portuguese. Badly translating abysmal dialogue into something that vaguely resembles English and then poorly dubbing the results so that the idiotic things these viscerally disturbing monsters say almost never correspond to the movement of their lips makes the whole thing even more surreal and disorienting. 

The envious rodent restauranteurs discover Marcelle’s secret and decide to sabotage him by making themselves known to the humans at the restaurant, leading them to put down rat traps. 

But first the evil rat capitalists do a dance that I initially thought, understandably, would factor into the plot, that humans would see the carriers of Rabies and filth dancing and be shocked and horrified. 

Nope! The dance serves no purpose other than to nudge the runtime closer to that magical forty minute mark, after which point it can throw its hands up and say, “Fuck it. We’ve literally done the absolute bare minimum so we can pack it in and go home.” 

Our heroes aren’t about to give up, however, so they form an alliance with a cat who is supposed to be cute and scary at the same time but is instead deeply unnerving.

The animation and character design are so bad they made me want to pour bleach into my eyes so that they could never again be subjected to such an assault ever again.  

Ratatoing is an aggregation of some of the worst animated fare of all time. It’s a combination of A Talking Cat!?!, Foodfight and Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa. 

For trash culture lovers that qualifies as high praise. Those aren’t just any losers: they’re historically awful, among the worst ever. 

The same can be said of Ratatoing. I thought it would be bad. I had no idea. It’s not just worse than the movie it’s ripping off; it’s worse than pretty much every movie ever. 

So if you are morbidly curious, the whole nightmare is available for free on Youtube and runs a simultaneously brief and endless forty one minutes so you can sample the madness without giving anyone any money they most assuredly do not deserve.  

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