A rat with a taste for fine food goes to Paris where he ends up providing the culinary acumen for an inept chef. Digitally animated tale from Disney-Pixar Okay, okay - we get it. Be yourself. Be what you want to be. This message has been hammered home in a gazillion family-oriented movies, and Ratatouille, Brad Bird‘s follow-up to the invigorating The Incredibles (2004), doesn‘t break the mould.

It is a Disney film after all, so a heavy handed message for the kids isn‘t surprising. The character of Pixar does seem to have subtly shifted since the company‘s acquisition by the House of the Mouse. Pixar‘s acclaimed first five feature films - Toy Story (1995), A Bug‘s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003) - were all produced relatively independently, with Disney handling the marketing and distribution. Between 2004 and 2006, however, Pixar and Disney wrangled over a new arrangement, which would ultimately result in ownership by Uncle Walt Corp.

Although Bird‘s The Incredibles survived the protracted and not entirely amiable negotiations remarkably unscathed, retaining a feistiness that‘s definitely not a contemporary Disney characteristic, the comparative flatness of 2006‘s Cars - the first film to carry the "Disney"Pixar" branding - may have been something to do with the conditions it was developed under. Similarly, Ratatouille lacks that old Pixar verve and originality. This may be due in part to the same issues, but possibly also due to its somewhat troubled production (which involved the project‘s originator being removed as director). Ratatouille is not a bad film by any means, it just feels tired when compared with Toy Story or Finding Nemo. Ironically, like A Bug‘s Life, it also suffers from being rather like another CGI film made around the same period - Aardman and DreamWorks‘ Flushed Away.

Both films start with a rat who gets forcibly detached from his familiar environment, getting washed into the sewers and finding himself in an entirely new situation. In the course of both stories, the heroes must work out for themselves who they are and what they want to be.

Beyond the hoary old message and the starting premise, the films diverge. Here, we have Remy (Oswalt), a young rat who lives with his father (Dennehy) and colony near a cottage in the French countryside. Being blessed - or perhaps cursed - with a discerning palette, Remy is drawn to the cottage‘s kitchen, but when its human owner spots him, he and his entire colony are forced to flee. Separated from his fellow rodents, Remy starts to have imaginary conversations with recently deceased celebrity chef Gusteau (Garrett).

"You must not let anyone define your limits because of where you came from," Gusteau intoned. When Remy‘s nose leads him to Gusteau‘s old restaurant, this is put to the test. Remy gets mixed up with Linguini (Romano), the new boy in the kitchen who everyone assumes has made a marvellous soup when in fact he messed it up and the rat redeemed it. They strike up an arrangement with Remy hiding under Linguini‘s toque and working him like a marionette by pulling his hair. It‘s a very silly conceit. The plot thickens when scheming head chef Skinner (Holm) looks into Linguini‘s paternity, while Linguini himself starts to get involved with chef Collette (Garofalo), a woman contending with the machismo of the kitchen. Oh, and there‘s also the slight matter of the impending visit of make-or-break food critic Anton Ego (O‘Toole).

All this is realised in a reliably effective fashion. Pixar‘s version of Paris - where every flat seems to have a view of the Eiffel Tower - is cartoon classy, while the character design is striking (Linguini is tall, thin and bendy, Skinner is small and cruel, and Ego looks like an aged vampire; in a nice visual aside, he even has an office shaped like a coffin). The voice acting is great - especially from O‘Toole and Garofalo - and it‘s nice to have Brian Dennehy back in a mainstream film, even if he is just voicing a cartoon rat.

Ratatouille keys into the current obsession with commercial cuisine and how chefs have become ‘celebrities‘ in the same way that models became ‘supermodels‘. The portrait of the kitchen busy handling orders is nifty work, giving a credible picture of the practicalities of the restaurant business. You almost expect Gordon Ramsay to come in and swear at everyone.