RATS RULE THE BOX OFFICE

Ratatouille is number one at the box office. Animators share their secrets.

The rats of Ratatouille beat Bruce Willis’ Live Free or Die Hard at the box office this weekend with $47 million chewing up the John McClane sequel which earned $33 million.

Pixar supervising animator Dylan Brown, and directing animator Mark Walsh who led a team of animators in Finding Nemo and Cars have lent their talents to Ratatouille. They discuss what went into animating rats.

“One of the main issues that we tackled was how to animate a rat. There are creative choices that we had to explore, creative options that we had explore to make choices about. Are the characters going to be humanoid so that they walk on two legs or are they going to respect the nature of the animals and based like quadroped.”

Remy has human characteristics like a passion for fine food, he walks upright and uses his front feet as if they were nimble-fingered human hands.

“We actually ended up servicing both in the film because our main character Remy is a rat so he’s a quadroped but he enters the human world and wants to be with human functions. So we have to take him up on two legs to do that. And as the story progresses and he becomes more and more in the human world we have to show that he’s more and more up on two legs.”

Pixar animators always leave their trademark number A113 somewhere in their films to mark the classroom number at the college where many learned their trade.