"Ratatouille" is about a lovable rat - Remy - who constantly risks his life in an expensive French restaurant because of his love for good food, as well as a burning desire to become a gourmet chef. Obviously, this is rather far-fetched for a rat but opportunity knocks when a young boy, who desperately needs to keep his job at the restaurant despite not being able to cook to save his life, makes Remy a partner. The two of them learn to avoid the insane head chef, bring the rest of Remy's family up to his culinary standards, win the boy a girlfriend, and of course, produce the finest ratatouille in all of France!

A rat who dreams of becoming a chef at a snobbish French restaurant? That's a strange subject for a big-budget cartoon. Rats are not what people would want to find in the kitchen. They will make anyone squirm. So how can anyone pull off a stunt like that as a family film? Well, if you were Brad Bird, who had thrilled us with "The Incredibles" and "The Iron Giant", that should be no problem. He just needed the right ingredients and an audience with an open mind.

Remy (voice of Patton Oswalt) is a suburban rat who loves good food. His senses are so refined that he refuses to eat garbage and is used by his clan as a "poison detector" since he can tell if something is toxic by sniffing it. His desire, however, is to become a chef like his TV hero Gusteau. He gets a chance to achieve his dreams when he meets Linguini (Lou Romano), a kitchen cleaner at a Paris restaurant, also called Gusteau's. Hiding under Linguini's chef's hat, Remy teaches the boy to create dishes of culinary delight. Soon, Gusteau's is the talk of Paris again and Linguini wins the heart of fellow chef Colette (Janeane Garofalo). However, not everybody is elated. The head chef (Ian Holm), who is jealous of Linguini's newfound fame, wants revenge. Also, food critic Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole) has decided to have a meal at Gusteau's - and on that very evening, Remy goes missing.

With even more realistic graphics and action seen from the point-of-view of the rats, "Ratatouille" gets our interest right from the start. Director Bird has taken computer animation one notch higher and a chase scene through the streets of Paris and onto boats on the River Seine is so splashingly real that we forget it is CGI.

Sometimes, we even forget that Remy is a rat! Bird fashions the movie as a parable about racism and tolerance. The conflict is between rats and humans, and members of each species get to learn a little about the other. There is also the classic Cyrano de Bergerac angle that has Remy teaching the boy to cook (instead of wooing the lady of his dreams).

The action in "Ratatouille" gets along like yummy French cuisine - up to the point when we see hordes of rats invading the kitchen and cooking meals. These sequences must be a put-off to parents in the audience and they could have been avoided or toned down. Still, with its slogan "Anyone Can Cook", the movie celebrates passion in creativity and the pursuit of excellence and it should inspire the kids in the audience.

To sum up, let's take a quote from Anton Ego: "Not everyone can be a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." Our compliments to master chef Brad Bird for this delightful repast. "Ratatouille" is not as entertaining as "The Incredibles", but it is close enough.

Note: Ratatouille is a stewed vegetable dish that originated from Nice. The key ingredients are tomatoes, with garlic, onions, zucchini (or cucumber), eggplant and basil - all marinated lightly in olive oil. It can be served as a meal on its own or as a filling for crepes or an omelette.

Just when you think animation flicks can't get any better, "Ratatouille" comes along and cooks up a story with a lot of heart.

Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) is not your average, dirty, garbage-infesting rat. He finds out early that he has a keen - almost epicurean - sense of smell and his unique gift makes him the rat colony's designated rat poison detector. Although useful, he believes that his talent holds the key to fulfilling his biggest dream - to become a great chef just like his idol, Paris' master chef Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett).

A disastrous infiltration of the country home he lives in causes the colony to make an escape and in the process, Remy is separated from his family. He tumbles through the fast and furious sewers until he lands safely - albeit alone and famished - in a dark underground tunnel. Inspiration is conjured in the form of Gusteau, who appears as a figment of Remy's imagination but with a little motivation, Remy musters enough courage to emerge from the dark hole, only to find that he had landed in the sewers of the great city of Paris, home of Gusteau's Restaurant.

The film beautifully conveys Paris from a rat's point of view. Remy's rodent sense of direction takes the viewer into the deepest nooks and crannies of the 'City of Romance'. Watching Remy scamper from one pipe to another and emerging in an entirely different location altogether is like watching what it must really like to be a rat. With great angles and animation, his travels are indeed very engaging to watch.

When Remy arrives at his idol's former restaurant, he is smitten by the smells and intricacies of fine gourmet food. It is here where he meets a young boy named Linguini (Lou Romano), the restaurant's garbage boy who has absolutely no talent for cooking whatsoever. When Remy saves a dish spoiled by Linguini, the two form an unusual partnership. To keep his job at the restaurant, Linguini asks Remy to help him become a good chef and together, they can become the best gourmands in Paris.

Unlike most animation films, "Ratatouille" is down-to-earth in voice acting and the voices fit the characters like a jigsaw puzzle. It never feels (or sounds) like it was lazily slapped with a celebrity's voice, hoping that the viewers would love it.

The story is heart-warming and the film is visually stunning. The animation design reminds me of a good old cartoon I used to watch when I was little called "Postman Pat". I love that series and "Ratatouille" is like a much bigger and more polished version of it. The film is exciting with a dose of good, hearty, wholesome sense of humour. I recommend bringing your appetites with you to watch it.

This Hong Kong dubbed version of "Ratatouille" ought to be watched, by the Chinese-speaking population of moviegoers at least, for just the pleasure of knowing what Linguini is in Cantonese!

Although watching this animated feature is no odder than say, "Tarzan" in Malay or "Finding Nemo" in Cantonese, the novelty value for dubbed films is still intact. We're not talking about made-for-dubbing features like "Doraemon", we're talking about big Hollywood money-spinners that coincidentally generate enough interest to surpass the demands for standard subtitling as a means of capturing a market.

Brad Bird's rip-roaring "Ratatouille" is the latest, and by no means the last, to join the dubious hall of fame for animated films which are given the voiceover treatment. Does it work? Yes and no. Cecilia Cheung's voiceover for Colette and also the one done for Skinner, the evil chef, are most problematic. In the world of animated films, the maker is presented with two obvious choices - either get a voice that looks like the drawn character, or draw the character so that he sounds like the voice. That's why Hollywood productions like to complete casting before they start drawing. How else would you get that pouty fish that looks 'sexactly' like Angelina Jolie in "A Shark's Tale"? In the case of dubbed animations however, the options are diminished. You can no longer alter the pictures, so the need for the perfect voiceover becomes more important than ever. Janeane Garofalo's feisty feminist charms oozed off well in the English version but Cecilia Cheung comes off more whiny than wonderful - not to mention one simply cannot imagine the character speaking the words.

However, the physical cartoon dimensions of the character are only part of the difficulty, the other part being the cultural and linguistic disparity. An emotional Parisian rat is not something that easily sits well with the Chinese understanding, without even going into the notion that the English original is, in itself, rather irregular in the long list of numbing Hollywood animations made for the undeniably American market. In "The Incredibles", the story was completely universal - a formula so pivotal in its success. In "Ratatouille", we have a rather adult, bourgeois-bashing underdog tale with fairly serious undertones, although told through the whiskered and pimply cartoon faces of Remy and Linguini respectively. This was a story more European than American in flavour, and yet deceptively freer from the American stereotypes that usually accompany it. If the intended 'American' markets would appreciate this less, as they no doubt would, how then does a Cantonese version fit into the scheme of things?

It is no wonder then that two of the smoother characters are Remy's dad and to a lesser extent, Anton Ego. Voiced by familiar Hong Kong actors, the dialogue adjustments for them were praiseworthy, although the dimensions of these characters were perhaps singular enough for the cultural aspect to be incidental to the cause. Failing were those provided by Ronald Cheng and Leong Hon Man who did Remy and Linguini respectively. For the viewer who has seen both the original and the dubbed, it feels as though the Cantonese could not bring over the richness of relationship between the man and the rat.

For someone watching this as a standalone, without the English original, the overwhelming feeling is that there is still something missing. The work of a critic is easy, as Anton Ego says in the film, but it would be hard pressed to believe that a good dubbed version could come from anywhere, although it must be true that anyone can write a movie review.