Ratatouille

One of the films that I'm going to look at for my extended writing piece is Ratatouille. As I'm going to be researching into appeal and performance, Ratatouille is a really good film to look in to as Pixar managed to make a rat appealing to the audience. A lot of it was down to the design of the characters as this is the immediate thing an audience would see, they needed to take previous misconceptions away from rats and portray them as something cute and appealing.

"If the visual qualities of character get the viewer’s attention during the storytelling, that’s appeal." 

With Emile it was a lot easier to make a chubby rat more appealing as this in itself makes something a lot more cute. Adding the type of personality that Emile has also adds to the appeal, clumsy yet friendly and most interested in his food. Through personality traits this can influence the animation style and performance. The 12 principles of animation will always play a bit part in any animation work, arcs, follow through, overlapping action, arcs, exaggeration, appeal, solid drawing etc - they all create a more realistic performance but in a stylised way. Animation performances can be extremely exaggerated but the characters still need to be believable and connect with the audience. For Ratatouille, one thing to pick up on is how the rats run, it's very quick but has a rhythm to it. The animators studied real rats and how they moved and interacted with objects, by understanding the real motion they could then take this and adapt it to produce a performance that expressed personality and charm.