REMY, c'est moi?
It's hard not to think that when meeting Brad Bird, "Ratatouille's" writer-director. He thoroughly identifies with his rat protagonist Remy, who yearns to be a chef in the heretofore unwelcoming kitchen of the legendary French restaurant Gusteau. Remy, an unsung artist with a sensational sense of smell, is a misfit in his tribe of rats. Before a gun-wielding grandma dislodged his rat community from its bucolic perch in the French countryside, Remy's father had consigned him to a life of sniffing out poison.
Bird was one of Hollywood's unsung talents until his 40s, a guy who impressed the likes of Pixar kingpin John Lasseter, Steven Spielberg and Simpsons creator Matt Groenig, but still toiled in relative anonymity.
His relative under-appreciation goes all the way back to his childhood in Oregon, when he'd trot home from school every day and spend hours holed up drawing. At 3, he drew Boinky -- a boxy rabbit -- in sequential pictures. At 11, he began drawing animation in earnest, and at 14, he completed his first film, a topsy-turvy version of "The Tortoise and the Hare," in which the slow and steady tortoise is the villain trying to subvert the speedy hare.
Nonetheless, his junior high guidance counselor tried to talk him out of a life in the movies. He asked Bird over and over again, "What do you want to do with your life?"
"I said, 'I want to make movies,' " recalls Bird. "We had a half-hour discussion where he kept trying to get me to say what else I would be interested in doing. He'd say, 'If movies didn't exist, what would you do?' And I'd say, 'I'd have to invent them.' "
Bird tells the story the way a veteran animator would: with all the appropriate voices. He's stern as the evil counselor, guileless as his teenage self. He returns to his present self for the moral: "That, in a nutshell, is the message sent to a lot of people who want to have a career in the arts. It's considered impractical, a far-fetched thing. To have a goal, something that excites you, that everybody else thinks is crazy -- I relate to that."
Bird is sitting in a hotel lounge in Westwood a couple of hours before "Ratatouille" sweeps the Annies, animation's top award. He looks like a Little Rascal gone middle-aged, with reddish hair, freckles and an impish grin -- along with the thickening midriff of a soccer dad. His youthful chutzpah has matured into a zesty confidence. And why not? In 2005, Bird won a best animated feature Oscar for "The Incredibles," for which he was also nominated in the screenplay category, and this year, he's received the same nominations for "Ratatouille."
