I thoroughly enjoyed this relatively simple animated picture from Pixar/Disney, but I’m having a hard time figuring out why. Perhaps, at the beginning of our preparations to move from Colorado to Orlando, a fun and engaging bit of escapism was the perfect prescription. In any event, I found the story of a rat that wants to be a chef consistently smile-inducing. The animation was strikingly three-dimensional and textured. I liked the compromise the movie took with the issue of a talking mouse: Remy the rat can read and understand people, but speaks rat-ish to his fellow rodents and cannot be understood by humans. This created a neat divide between the human world of Linguini, the incompetent would-be chef, and the rat world of Remy, the culinary rodent genius. I also felt like the movie didn’t follow all the standard plot devices for a kid’s movie: while there is a villain, his role is almost incidental. The main problem for Linguini and Remy is the obvious one of their circumstance: Remy is a rat.