Jan Pinkava
speaker
39 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Jan Pinkava’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So overall, I'm really very happy and grateful that it turned out to be such a successful movie.
I'm now here in Germany, of all places, at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg in the Animation Institute. What is the primary mission? Is it education? Is it outreach? It's filmmaking. It's very much learning by doing. It's about let's make movies and fail miserably sometimes and succeed wonderfully sometimes. There's very little sitting and cogitating and theorizing and philosophizing.
It's about practical doing and a lot about working together because the bigger the project, the more of a team sport filmmaking is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you did. If you've got to do it, you've got to do it. You'll figure out a way somehow.
really to help us get along with each other. There are lots of beautiful examples of stories like this. Billy Elliot, for instance, that's about a minor son in 1980s strike-ridden Northern England who has to figure out how to be a ballet dancer, which is the most unmanly thing he can possibly be doing in the middle of this. So in a way, Ratatouille is like ballet dancing with Nazis.
We're not only doing the thing you're not supposed to be doing, you're doing it with people who are ready to kill you as soon as they see you. I was immediately drawn to the character of Remy as stuck between these two worlds. You know, he's going somewhere where he cannot possibly be, the kitchen where everyone just... from the get-go, hates him, will kill him.
And on the other side, he's betraying his people, his family. He wants to work with the enemy, with the people who will kill us if they see us. So he's stuck there on his own. Ratatouille as an idea, as a story, it's an allegory. What's it about, really? It's not about rats and cooking. It's about prejudice. It's about...
Overcoming the limitations imposed on you by misrepresentation, by misunderstanding. It's about racism, sexism, everything. All those different forms of prejudice in the form of a rat cooking story.
Well, it's always been a slur to call someone a rat. That's an epithet that's used to paint them as the other, the thing that you should hate and kill and push away. Any story that sees the world from the perspective of the shunned and the hated is hopefully gives us an opportunity to open up our feelings for each other.
Well, Django, the father, he has a point, right? Everything the world tells him is he's right. There's no arguing against him. Remy gets it. And you hope that the whole thing adds up to that moment when Remy finally has to come out. reveal himself as the cooking rat, step off that ledge with no one to catch him and take that ultimate risk with the risk of his own life. It's a real crisis.
It's a life or death choice. And he chooses to be himself. And hopefully the story adds up to that feeling with the audience going, what will happen? How will this go? Because your job as a story writer is to get to that ending that really has to happen in the movie. There's only one way to end it. He has to find a way to be himself.
Yeah, he ends up being able to cook. That was always going to happen. And interacting with humans. Yeah, because there are some humans that he can interact with. The humans who care about cooking and who don't care who's doing the cooking because they recognize genius when they see it. What I do love is this
dramatized contrast of the world's attitudes to cooking and rats in one with ego the critic brad did a fantastic thing of casting peter o'toole which was one of his last roles and really a beautiful performance and this whole zoom into his childhood when he tastes the ratatouille and suddenly this cold cadaverous disappointed critic whose entire career has been
being judgmental, is returned to his early childhood in just one moment, and we feel for him.
It's love, isn't it? The scene, if you remember, he's fallen off his bike and he's a kid. He's been crying. He's had a bad time. And his mother serves him this simple peasant dish. And through that shows her love for him. It's love.
I hope it opens a door to just thinking differently about a species that you might otherwise just dismiss as a category. People want to put rats on their head in their imagination. That's something, right? That's a door opening to another way of thinking.
Look, you put a mouse next to a rat. And you go, okay, who's the bad guy? It's a fairly easy choice because the rat's bigger, it's scruffier, it's got a longer nose, and it has that slightly disturbing bald tail. But these are all cosmetic differences. They are.
They are. Now, what is wrong with us that we judge by appearances? That's a big question, isn't it, Jan? Yeah. I mean, do you have any solutions for that? Exposure. You've got to see the thing that you judge as other early in life as just there and it's okay. And what's your personal feeling today about rats? I think rats are a part of our life that we need to get used to.
They are creatures in the world that have every right to be here. Okay.
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