Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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Reality Bites: Pixar Director Brad Bird

Posted Jun 27, 2007 by Jeff Houck

Updated Jun 27, 2007 at 07:05 AM

In today’s Tribune Flavor section, you’ll find my interview with film director Brad Bird, whose animated movie “Ratatouille” comes out on Friday.

We chatted about the technical challenges that come with trying to animate food, something that everyone in the audience is judging as real or fake, all while watching a pretty absurd tale of a rat who wants to be a chef.

Here are some outtakes from that interview:

Q: When you watch food onscreen, you want your eye to take in the information that this is something that’s edible.

A: Right. And the weird thing is, if you didn’t do that, people wouldn’t know why it didn’t look right. They would just say, “Eh, there’s something weird about that.” They won’t know that it takes these geniuses who probably could have gone on to design the space shuttle but who had a yen for cartoons to figure out what that is and how to simulate it.

And that was only one tiny component. There were other things we learned from other breakthroughs. We had subsurface scattering starting on “Nemo” and being perfected on “The Incredibles.” And that was to make the skin of the human characters not look like plastic. That was based on the thing that actually happens with real skin where light penetrates the surface of the skin, hits blood vessels under the skin, bounces around and then glows back through the skin.

Q: But there’s a difference between when you look at human skin and then when you look at the inside of a loaf of baguette, which if you put your naked eye up to it, it looks like something from a neutron microscope.

A: Right. Absolutely. But what I was going to say is that the subsurface scatting we did to give the skin a bit of a glow came into play when we did something like grapes.

Q: There’s a luminescence there, too.

A: There is a luminescence to grapes. And if you don’t do it, it’s a very subtle effect, but it’s the difference between wax fruit and something you’d want to eat.

Q: When I saw Remy making an omelet for Linguine, there’s a way that it lays on the spatula that, first of all, I thought, “I can taste that in my mouth and I can smell what it smells like.” There’s a flexibility to the omelet. And then, seond, I thought, “But that’s a rat making an omelet.”

A: That’s right. And when he picks it up, there are real physics in the way he’s animated because he has to lean back in order to counteract the weight of the omelet. It’s like when a person uses one of those long nets to clean out a pool, there’s a certain amount of weight on the pole and you’ll lean back to counteract it. Well, a lot of people who do animation, and I won’t name any names, a lot of the other studios don’t observe real physics at all. Now you don’t have to adhere to real physics to make things react the way they do in real life, but if you use real physics in denying real physics, it makes it convincing to the eye.

Q: That’s what made the coyote dropping with the anvil so funny. The weight of the anvil was real, but the coyote with his little umbrella was the joke.

A: There you go. There you go.

Q: I have to say the thing that got my attention in the detail you guys paid came in the chase scene where Remy almost gets broiled by the burners underneath the stove.

A: [laughs]

Q: That told me that an animator had to get down on hands and knees and look under that iron beast and see how it operated.

A: Yeah. And it was a very tricky sequence to lay out because we’re always trying to keep the eye focused on his escape, and reconnecting the audience with that yet while introducing all these threats. At the same time we want to slowly introduce the idea that he’s starting to get seduced into cooking. There’s a short little bit where in order to avoid being discovered, he hides in a pan and for the slightest second, he smells the carrots and starts to get interested in them. Then, someone reaches in and grabs it and puts the pan in the oven. But you’re starting to slowly introduce the idea that, “Hey, man, I’m around some really high end food here.” All of this is going to sell with a really far-fetched idea.

Q: I told people after seeing the film that it does a service in that it explains the kitchen hierarchy and who does what job. But there is a bit about how food can be enjoyed in a different way, with the effects about mixing flavors, mixing aromas. I thought that was really cool.

A: Thank you. That’s actually hand-drawn animation, too.