The Animal No One Loves, Until They Do

Stephen DUBNER: Are you a chef? Are you a home cook? 

Jan PINKAVA: I can cook.

DUBNER: He says reluctantly.

PINKAVA: I sometimes cook well. Not always.

DUBNER: Do you happen to make a nice ratatouille?

PINKAVA: Yeah, I’ve made ratatouille before, but I don’t have the skill, taste, and feeling to make a great ratatouille. The thing is, it’s just a bunch of vegetables, right? 

DUBNER: Well, yes, but no.

PINKAVA: Yes but no, exactly. And that’s the thing. Ratatouille as theme, and a title for the film, that was there from the beginning, for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s about rats. And “ratatouille,” it tells you it’s a comedy, because it’s a silly word. And ratatouille as the quintessential peasant dish — it’s just vegetables, it’s stuff that you can find easily. If you know how to cook it well, it’s beautiful. 

I’m speaking here with Jan Pinkava.

PINKAVA: I worked on a couple of the early feature films of Pixar, including A Bug’s Life and Monsters, Inc., and Toy Story 2. And I got a break to develop my own feature film. 

That feature film was Ratatouille. It’s about a rat named Remy who lives in a farmhouse in the French countryside, and dreams of becoming a chef.

REMY: You found CHEESE? And not just any cheese — Tomme De Chevre de Pays! That would go beautifully with my mushroom!

But then Remy, his family, and his entire rat tribe are chased into exile, and he winds up in the sewers of Paris. As he explores the city above ground, Remy comes across the legendary Gusteau’s restaurant. The late chef Auguste Gustaeu was Remy’s hero — his famous book is called Anyone Can Cook. But Remy sees that Gusteau’s restaurant is now run by a corrupt, tyrannical chef; and there is a new garbage boy in the kitchen named Linguini.

CHEF SKINNER: Move it, garbage boy. You are cooking? How dare you cook in my kitchen!?

Linguini does want to cook, but he doesn’t have much talent. Remy has talent but he’s a rat. So the two of them become secret collaborators.

REMY (V.O.): One look and I knew, we had the same crazy idea.

Remy hides on top of Linguini’s head, under his chef’s toque, and becomes his puppet-master chef. Together, they make beautiful food: potato-leek soup, the perfect French omelet, and a twist on “sweetbreads a la Gusteau.” It turns out that Linguini is the son of the great Gusteau; and the secret collaboration between Linguini and Remy turns out to be a big hit. As was the film itself. Ratatouille, released in 2007, won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and it grossed over half a billion dollars. That made Ratatouille a big outlier in Hollywood — and Remy the rat was an outlier too. As we’ve been learning in this series on rats, it is a rare day when a rat is the hero of any story. Since the days of the bubonic plague, rats have been associated with death and disease. To call someone a rat is a special kind of insult — it suggests they’ve behaved so badly as to be subhuman. But is it time to reassess the rat’s reputation — perhaps even rehabilitate it? Today on Freakonomics Radio, we dissect Ratatouille with Jan Pinkava:

PINKAVA: In a way, Ratatouille is like ballet dancing with Nazis.

We look at why rats have been so valuable to human science.

Bethany BROOKSHIRE: Like, right all the way down to DNA.

And we hear a love story:

Julia ZICHELLO: Not to say anything negative about the hamsters of the world, but I think it’s a different relationship.

Come along for this third and final episode in our series “Sympathy for the Rat.”

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We humans really love some animals. Two-thirds of American households have at least one pet, most of them dogs or cats; we often treat them like members of the family. When we hear about an animal being mistreated or killed, the outcry can be as loud as if it happened to a fellow human — if not louder. And yet: in 2022, when New York City mayor Eric Adams declared war on rats, and appointed a rat czar to get rid of them, there was almost no outcry. The rat seems to have crossed some invisible border from animal to pest, even menace. But it wasn’t always thus.

ZICHELLO: The first rats that were domesticated — they were pets in Victorian England, and they were not thought of as negatively as we think about even pet rats today. So, it was revered to have a rat on your shoulder.

This is Julia Zichello. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and is an evolutionary biologist at Hunter College. But her rat experience is not just academic.

ZICHELLO: During the pandemic, I got a car for the first time. Because alternate-side-of-the-street parking was relaxed, I kept it in one place for too long. I also don’t really drive that often — so yes, when I went to start it, it didn’t start, and I had to get it towed. And the mechanic told me that there was bedding in there connected with rats, and also orange peels.

DUBNER: This was in the engine?

ZICHELLO: This was in the engine. It was the late fall, early winter, which is just the time that they would be looking for a warm place. I thought it was really funny at first, before I got the bill from the mechanic.

DUBNER: What did it look like inside the engine?

ZICHELLO: The wires were gnawed. You can see shards, or pieces of the wire. and then the orange peels and some dry leaves and other things that they were using for nesting material. 

DUBNER: I know that rats are extraordinarily fertile — they have really short gestation, they have a lot of pups. Do you know if maybe your car was also a rat baby hospital as well? 

ZICHELLO: I don’t know. But it may have been — which is, you know, kind of cute.

Zichello had never thought deeply about rats until they moved into her car. And even then, her attitude was relaxed — she wasn’t strongly anti-rat, nor did she find a reason to become pro-rat. But soon after the car incident, things changed.

ZICHELLO: Yeah. So I inherited rats from a family member who moved to a building that could no longer have pets. The rats were already, I believe, 18 months old. I felt the same way most people would feel, like, the, “Oh, no way” kind of thing. Like, “Oh my gosh, their tails.” Everyone’s so upset about their tails because they’re so gross. But then I warmed to them over time. Eventually, because you’re feeding it, because it’s a little bit lovely, then you end up feeling some warmth towards it.

DUBNER: What kind of rats were your pet rats? 

ZICHELLO: They were two different breeds. One was agouti, and that was sort of silver-colored. The other was a hooded rat, which was white with just a little bit of black on their head, and striped down their back.

DUBNER: Can I have some names, please? 

ZICHELLO: One was named Sylvie, and the other was Pele. They were both males. 

DUBNER: So you didn’t have any breeding, obviously? 

ZICHELLO: Correct, no offspring. You know, they were fun to watch. They were interactive. They eat a lot of different things. We had some fun feeding them the circular corn chips. They would take the corn chip like you would a steering wheel of a car and turn it, turn it around and eat it around the edges. One thing I noticed about the two pet rats is that they had different personalities from one another. Sylvie was much more bold and Pele was much more cryptic. They ate food in different ways. Pele would take the food and go into this little hide-y box, and Sylvie would just unabashedly eat the food out there in front of you. 

DUBNER: Do they vocalize?

ZICHELLO: They did. Not a lot. Technically, rats do vocalize. 

DUBNER: It was only when they were socializing with each other, or would they vocalize when they were hanging, with you?

ZICHELLO: Only when they were socializing with each other. They were not super-vocal that I heard — and I think there are sounds we can’t hear. 

DUBNER: Can you imitate the sounds that you did hear? 

ZICHELLO: Mmm, I don’t know about that.

DUBNER: Is it like a squeaking kind of thing?

ZICHELLO: Yes. Very, very, very light squeaking. Not like long vocalizations. They were not singing. There’s been some research showing that rats can laugh when they’re tickled. Those are things that you can’t hear with the human ear, though there were special recordings that were showing that. 

Here’s what those special recordings sound like.

ZICHELLO: They also were very responsive to all of the sounds in the environment in the apartment. Things like the coffee grinder — I was noticing that the hooded rat was really stressed out when I was grinding coffee.

DUBNER: So what would you do about that?

ZICHELLO: I mean, I couldn’t do anything. I had no room to move them, and I couldn’t stop drinking coffee. 

DUBNER: Did you take your grinder into the bathroom or a closet or something? 

ZICHELLO: No, no. I just noted it, and continued on with the grinding. Their sensory systems are so acute. Obviously, their olfaction, their sense of smell, is really good. Their hearing is really good, and they seem very sensitive to things in their environment. It did also make me think about the rats in New York City. There aren’t a lot of studies about the behavior of wild rats from the perspective of the rats. One of the things I thought about after having the pet rats is that I wonder if the rats in New York City are very, very stressed. They like to be underground. When you see them skittering across the sidewalk, it stresses you out, but I’m pretty sure that they’re also highly stressed. 

DUBNER: Is it possible that one partial solution to the infestation of wild rats in a city like New York would be the widespread embrace of pet rats? 

ZICHELLO: I don’t know about the widespread embrace of pet rats, but I think the rat czar in New York, I think that she should have a pet rat. If you want to control them or if you want to love them, you have to know about them. 

I first came across Julia Zichello when I read a piece she wrote for a hyper-local news site called The West Side Rag. If you live on the Upper West Side and don’t read the Rag? — well, I don’t even know what to say. Here’s the first line of Zichello’s piece: “Almost a year has passed, and I can finally write about it.”

ZICHELLO: So they both passed away, sadly. One of the things that happened towards the end of their life, which also is something that’s relevant to all rats, is that they aged so quickly, and they started to show signs of aging — like being hunched over, losing body fat. One month in a rat’s life is equal to three years in human years. People know this because there’s a lot of people, obviously, who use rats in the lab trying to study aging, and trying to make that equivalent. So they aged very rapidly. We don’t really exactly know why they died. They didn’t show any signs of disease that we could see. But one of the things that happened that was very sad is that Sylvie died first, and then for Pele, he was alone. So we bought him a little toy that was the shape of a rat, because I knew that he would be lonely. It was a cat toy. He was not interested in the cat toy. And then he died less than a week later. This is typical of rats, because they’re so social, and they really like to have other rats around.

DUBNER: So Pele died you think of heartbreak, essentially?

ZICHELLO: I think maybe, yeah. We knew that the lifespan of domestic rats is around two years, and they were two-and-a-half years old. So, you know, they lived a good life. We certainly appreciated them, and learned a lot.

DUBNER: I want to read a couple sentences from the piece you wrote: “I regularly walk the Upper West Side and spot swashbuckling rats at all hours, but other times I find them squashed. I don’t exactly feel sad about the dead rats but I also don’t feel nothing. The dead rats make me think about life, death, and somewhere stuffed between the pavement and the pelage ” — I guess pelage is the fur of the rat, yes? —“there is something about love in there too.” Can you say more about that love?

ZICHELLO: I will never see a squashed rat in New York City again and not think about our pet rats. I know that they are different. The rats in the wild are more aggressive. It wouldn’t be the same thing as the pet rats that I experienced. But, I mean, of course you’d think about your pet.

DUBNER: Are you going to replace them? Maybe that’s unfair to say. Are you going to get more rats? 

ZICHELLO: Definitely not. I’m definitely not getting pet rats again. 

DUBNER: Because why?

ZICHELLO: It’s too heartbreaking. Their lifespan is too short. And the relationship between their charm and their lifespan is too asymmetrical. 

Julia Zichello, as a scientist living in New York, is by now familiar with what you might call the three main categories of rat: the wild ones who live on the streets; the domesticated ones who live in your home; and the rats that are bred to live (and die) in research labs.

ZICHELLO: There are many studies across neuroscience and pharmaceuticals and psychology that used rats for decades. The rats that are lab rats are more genetically homogenous than wild rats. Rats and humans shared a common ancestor 90 million years ago. That’s not super-close, but it’s close enough to have revealed things about the brain and behavior and genetics that have ultimately helped humans. So I wonder about how many people have technically been helped by that versus the number of people who have been harmed by diseases they may have acquired from a rat. 

DUBNER: What was the common ancestor? 

ZICHELLO: The common ancestor was an animal that lived in the late Cretaceous, around the time of the dinosaurs. There’s not a specific name, but we use genetics to understand how far back these common ancestors lived. The anatomy and behavior of that common ancestor was much more rat-like than it is human-like. They were likely nocturnal. Some of them may have been insectivores, and their basic anatomy was much more rat-like than humans.

DUBNER: For all the parallels there may be between a rodent like a rat and humans, one gigantic difference is fertility and lifespan. Is that meaningful in any significant way to us? 

ZICHELLO: Yeah, so that makes rats good model organisms because you can have many offspring within your human life as a scientist studying them. So you can see how things translate from one generation to the next. One rat female can have up to 72 pups per year. And if we think about a rat pair — so a male and a female — and you think about them having offspring, and those offspring having offspring, within one year there can be like, one thousand, two hundred rats born just from that pair. From the perspective of controlling rats in the wild, that’s a problem. But from the perspective of using rats in the lab, that’s a virtue.

What other virtues does the lab rat have?

BROOKSHIRE: If you want an animal to press a lever and receive a drug, a rat is generally the better choice.

And how did the rat become a lab animal in the first place?

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In one recent year, the market for laboratory rats in the U.S. was estimated at $1.5 billion, and that number is expected to rise as biomedical research keeps expanding. The cost of a lab rat can range from around $25 apiece to a few thousand dollars for a specially bred or genetically engineered specimen. But as many lab rats as there are, they are outnumbered by lab mice.

BROOKSHIRE: Well, they’re cheaper. They’re smaller. 

That is Bethany Brookshire. We heard from her in part one of this series. She’s the author of a book called Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains.

BROOKSHIRE: Especially now with the advent of CRISPR technologies that allow us to alter adult genetics and fetal genetics — we established that first in mice. We can do it in rats now. But it’s very, very well-established in mice. And so that really took off.

DUBNER: Are there research projects or experiments for which rats are prima facie better than mice? 

BROOKSHIRE: Yes. In my experience, rats are better for self-administration of drugs. So, if you want an animal to press a lever and receive a drug, a rat is generally the better choice because of size. Because mice are so small, it’s really hard to make a lever that they can press well. 

DUBNER: I see. I thought you were going to say that mice — their hands are too small to hold a joint, and that rats somehow —

BROOKSHIRE: If you could teach them to roll joints, I imagine that the mice would just roll a smaller one. 

Before she was a science writer, Brookshire was a practicing scientist at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, where she got a Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology.

BROOKSHIRE: I studied primarily drugs of abuse in graduate school. And then I studied antidepressants for my postdoc. 

DUBNER: What were some drugs that you were giving to mice and rats? 

BROOKSHIRE: Ritalin, cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, alcohol, Prozac. If you want to be really nerdy about it — I studied the dopamine serotonergic interactions in the ventral tegmental area nucleus accumbens circuit of the mouse brain. 

DUBNER: That was going to be my guess but, you know.

BROOKSHIRE: Yeah, so I was interested in drugs that primarily targeted dopaminergic systems.

DUBNER: What were you looking for? 

BROOKSHIRE: I was interested in chronic, high-dose administration of methylphenidate, which is Ritalin. Humans, we give people Ritalin starting at very young ages. So I was very interested in what chronic exposure to these drugs means for the brain as you get older — does it make you more or less susceptible to drug addiction?

DUBNER: And what did you learn?

BROOKSHIRE: It’s tough to say. I did show that in some animals, you get tolerance to other drugs that are similar. In some, you get sensitization, so they’re more sensitive to the effects. you also get transferal, so different drugs that don’t necessarily primarily hit that pathway will begin to hit that pathway. 

DUBNER: I’ve read that the mouse or rat model in research can be really fruitful for certain kinds of research, but unfruitful for others. What can you tell me about that? 

BROOKSHIRE: I can say that, for example, in the area where I was looking, which is a group of structures that we call the basal ganglia, there’s a lot of similarity between basal ganglias across all mammals — heck, across, like, reptiles. It’s when you get into kind of higher-order stuff that things get more different. Certainly there are drastic differences in things like the immune system. But I do strongly feel that rats and mice are really essential to our understanding of the human body and the human brain. 

DUBNER: What are the other things that make mice and rats still really popular subjects of this kind of research? Is it that they’re available, cheap, docile, that they breed quickly, that they respond quickly? 

BROOKSHIRE: Mice and rats have become very popular research animals in part because they were actually sold that way. C.C. Little, who founded the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, which is one of the world’s biggest purveyors of mice for scientific purposes — he wrote a piece in Scientific American selling the mouse as a lab animal to the public. The opening line was, “Do you like mice? Of course you don’t.” He basically said, mice are awful, and we hate them, but they could be heroes of medicine. It can be a replacement for other animals that we are currently using. At that time, dogs were a really big research animal. He proposed mice as being cheaper, faster. They do have all of those things. We have amazing abilities to alter their genetics now. But all of that stems from the fact that we consider them pests. We consider them expendable. 

DUBNER: And how do you feel about that as a human? 

BROOKSHIRE: It’s complicated.

DUBNER: Says the woman who, as a scientist, did her share of rat and mouse experiments. 

BROOKSHIRE: Sure did.

DUBNER: And I’m guessing a bunch of them died in the process of that, yes?

BROOKSHIRE: Yes, hundreds. And I feel bad about it. At the same time, you know, they worked really hard for me. They worked hard for me. I liked working with them. Rats are much sweeter than mice, by the way. If you are going to have one as a pet, have a rat. Mice I like because mice are honest. Mice don’t like you. They’re never gonna like you. Rats like you. You pick one up, and after a while they snuggle into you. They’ll snuggle in your armpit or your elbow, or they’ll get on your neck. They’re sweet, and they’re smart. They make great pets, honestly. 

DUBNER: Okay, for the record, I’m looking here at your author photo, where you’re looking like a regular human, right? Dressed nicely, standing in a nice place, but then you’ve got this rat kind of curled — not even curled up, like, luxuriating in the crook of your arm. 

BROOKSHIRE: Yeah, that’s — Magrat is her name, and she is not mine. And sadly, she has since passed away, because rats don’t live very long. But she was a wonderful model. She did not pee on me the entire time. I was shocked.

This kind of affection toward the rat — expressed here by Brookshire, and earlier by Julia Zichello — would seem to be rare. Anti-rat sentiment is widespread and it is vocal. Let’s not forget: New York Mayor Eric Adams calls rats “public enemy number one.” But there are other voices out there, and other sentiments. A researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands named Koen Beumer published a paper called “Catching the Rat,” in which he examines the portrayal of rats in 20^th century novels, movies, comics, and more. In this analysis, Beumer found an extraordinarily diverse spectrum of human-rat relations; he argues that for many people, rats are no longer seen chiefly as villains. And here’s Bethany Brookshire again:

BROOKSHIRE: I absolutely think the way we see animals in media can strongly affect our perception. I’ve been able to learn from my own research that rats are absolutely not public enemy number one everywhere, right?

You may remember the story that Brookshire told us in part one of this series, about the temple in India where rats are worshipped.

BROOKSHIRE: They don’t have to be the villain that we see them as. They could be something else. And the good news is that humans can change their minds. We do it all the time. So, we could do it with rats too. I love the movie Ratatouille. I love that movie because not only do I like rats, I love food. I’ve never yet been able to make that picture-perfect ratatouille that Remy makes. It never looks that good. 

We go back to Jan Pinkava to find out the real mission of the film Ratatouille.

PINKAVA: Really to help us get along with each other.

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When the film Ratatouille was released in 2007, the New York Times critic A.O. Scott described it like this: “a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film.” The screenwriter and director was Brad Bird, who a few years earlier had made The Incredibles. Bird was also one of three people credited with “original story” — the other two were Jim Capobianco and the man we met earlier, Jan Pinkava.

PINKAVA: I came up with the original idea, and wrote a treatment, came up with the name Ratatouille, and the basic bones and outlines of the concept and the story. And then co-wrote a script with Jim Capobianco. And there were many versions of the script with various people on the way, as is always the case. And we began developing the movie.

Pinkava was born in what was then Czechoslovakia, but after the Soviet invasion of 1968, his family moved to England; he was six years old. He was interested in film from early on; when he was 12, he got an 8-millimeter camera for Christmas; he won a national competition for young filmmakers, run by the BBC. He was good at finding ideas in unusual places. For instance: watching his grandfather play chess by himself.

PINKAVA: His name was Tony, Antonin and he was a very serious man. He was the first of 10 children, the son of a village cobbler, and he had perfect grades at school. He was an engineer who designed railway engine-braking systems. He was a man who had a hard life. When he did something, he did it seriously. So, when he played chess, he would take as long as it took to make the next move. And that’s how he won a lot of games, by boring the other side to death. But when he was playing with himself, he would just stare at the board and just keep on thinking and thinking and thinking as far and deeply as he could until he could make the move he wanted. And then he turned the board around, and then he —

DUBNER: Did it again.

PINKAVA: Did it again. And yeah, it took a while.

Jan Pinkava studied computer science as an undergraduate, and he got a Ph.D. in robotics. This led to a career as a computer animator, and in 1993 he landed a job at Pixar. They were then starting pre-production on Toy Story, and Pinkava was assigned to the commercials group. After a few years, he made an animated short called Geri’s Game, about an old man who plays chess against himself. Geri’s Game earned Pinkava an Academy Award — and a chance to pitch a feature film to the Pixar brain trust.

PINKAVA: I’m pitching to John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft, the head of story, and Ed Catmull, the head of the studio. These are just the early concepts for a film. One of the ideas was, ah, this is a story about a rat who wants to become a chef. Everyone laughs. Everyone gets it. You’re sold. 

The idea had come to him at home, while he and his wife were in the kitchen. 

PINKAVA: How can a rat become a chef? You can immediately see the central problem of the story right there. It is obviously a disaster. And it’s going to be funny if you can make it work.

But the “making it work” part would be difficult.

PINKAVA: We were developing this film for quite a while. You’re working on story, you’re working on designs, characters, scenes, environments, and so on. We did several versions of the story reel — a story reel is drawings edited with sound and music to basically be a movie you can watch in the form of drawings. That’s how an animated film is prototyped. It’s a way of making the movie before you’ve made the movie because in animation, you do not want to cut animation out.

DUBNER: Just because it’s so time-intensive and expensive, yes? 

PINKAVA: Yeah, and because you’re creating everything. You’re making a whole world come to life artificially. Every blade of grass, every gesture of the character, somebody has put a lot of work into it. This film had a longer gestation period. By the time it was made, it was six years into it.

DUBNER: So, what happened then? I mean, I know the end of the story, but just give me the shortish version of what happened over the next couple of years between the full prototype, let’s say, and the film being released. 

PINKAVA: We worked on it, had a bunch of versions. In making a movie like that, it goes up and down. you’re continually changing. One of the wonderful things that everyone should remember and understand is that Pixar didn’t happen because of computer graphics. Pixar happened because of story. At least half the effort on any one of these movies, at least half, is story — story, story, story. And making sure that the thing that’s being made is an appealing, engaging story with characters that you care about, that really make sense to an audience. We got into the character development, and the designs, and the environments, the kitchen, being in Paris and so on. And it involved also some fabulous experiences of research. That’s a thing that Pixar is famous for: getting in-depth research to feed the process of making the movie authentic. We ended up going twice to Paris, to dine in the finest restaurants, and meet with the chefs. The artist has to suffer, right? So, you have to do your work.

DUBNER: Was there rat research as well? 

PINKAVA: Yeah, there was rat research. 

DUBNER: Was that something that you were personally involved in, or were you having researchers feed you information? And what was the information? Was it the biology, the history, the personality of rats? 

PINKAVA: We spoke to a bunch of people with different attitudes to rats. For instance, I remember the national president of the Rat Fanciers Association of the United States, the people who like to keep rats as pets. She was wonderful. She was really insightful and knowledgeable about who rats are as characters, real rats. One of the lovely things she told us was, there’s the old cliché that dogs look up to you and cats look down on you. If you have a rat as a pet, that’s a peer-to-peer relationship. A rat looks you in the eye and doesn’t feel inferior or superior. It’s just, you are like me, I’m like you. 

DUBNER: That’s so interesting. Do you believe that to be true? 

PINKAVA: Uh, you know, she, she, she, she certainly has that expertise. One of the things that makes it believable to me is that in the history of organized human life, rats have been right there with us all along, you know?

DUBNER: What else did you learn about rats? 

PINKAVA: Biologically, they have some interesting traits. Like, rats are incontinent. They don’t know when to not do it. That’s just being a rat, right? You poop and pee whenever. So, actually keeping a real rat on your head would not be such a good idea.

DUBNER: Okay. And that was a piece of real rat biology you chose to not include in the film.

PINKAVA: No, no, it didn’t seem to have a good story point there for our main character, the guy in the kitchen doing the cooking to be doing that too much.

DUBNER: What’s it like to see a film like this have such great success knowing that you gave birth to it, and you raised it, but weren’t around to, let’s say, see it graduate? 

PINKAVA: I was around a long part of the way, not right to the very end, and that’s normal for the film industry. I was a first-time feature director coming up with an idea and getting it made — which, in the grand scheme of things is a pretty great result. And I have tremendous respect for Brad Bird as a writer and director. And he took great pains — when it was time to take over — to talk to me and the crew and especially to sit down and listen to what my intentions had been making this story, and what I was hoping for, and to really understand where the whole thing came from and what it meant, so that he could then take it his way, which you have to do as a director. So, overall, I’m really very happy and grateful that it turned out to be such a successful movie.

Pinkava left Pixar soon after, and he worked on a few other features and shorts. But none have achieved as much acclaim or prestige as Ratatouille, or the other projects he worked on at Pixar. And where is Jan Pinkava today?

PINKAVA: I’m now here in Germany, of all places, at the film academy Baden-Württemberg in the animation institute. 

DUBNER: What is the primary mission — is it education, is it outreach? 

PINKAVA: 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. 

DUBNER: This reminds me of hearing Werner Herzog talk not that long ago, about when he was in film school. Mostly he just stole cameras from school, and went out, and shot.

PINKAVA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did. If you got to do it, you’ve got to do it. You’ll figure out a way somehow. 

DUBNER: I’ve heard you speak about the mission of filmmaking and storytelling generally, which is to give people not just an opportunity to be engaged and entertained, but an opportunity to change their perspective on something. When you began thinking about and writing Ratatouille, what perspective were you thinking about changing? 

PINKAVA: 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 miner’s 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 a 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. 

DUBNER: I didn’t think about the Nazis until the scenes, well along in the film, after Remy gets reunited with his rat family and his rat tribe in the sewers, and then later he gets lost on the streets of Paris and he runs into some humans who plainly hate rats, they scream when they see him, they literally kick him to the curb. And he’s made to feel disgusting, dirty, worthless, etc., etc. That was the first time that the allegory really hit me. I’m curious, when you grow up in Europe, as you did, you have a different relationship to the war, plainly, than Americans do, and a different relationship to Germany and Naziism. It’s interesting that you’re now living in Germany. Obviously, so much has changed. But I am curious about, you know, the way Remy in that moment was seen as an outcast, as dirty, as ruinous.

PINKAVA: 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 hopefully gives us an opportunity to open up our feelings for each other.

DUBNER: And Remy tries to convince his father that the course of events can change — the course of events, in this case, being rat relations with humans. In your film, it’s hard to say whether the rats hate the humans more or the humans hate the rats more. It’s intense on both sides. And the father argues that, you know, “Son, nature is nature.” What were you going for there?

PINKAVA: 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 is 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.

DUBNER: Was your original ending — even if just in your head — as happy an ending as the film ultimately had? 

PINKAVA: Yeah, he ends up being able to cook. That was always going to happen.

DUBNER: And interacting with humans.

PINKAVA: 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-in to 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.

DUBNER: In that moment, it will remind many of us of that Proustian rush, when Proust eats the madeleine, and his entire, you know, childhood life, philosophy comes —

PINKAVA: A la recherche du temps perdu. 

DUBNER: It all comes rushing back to him, and provokes this unbelievable examination of his own life. In your case, when Anton Ego tastes the ratatouille, and has this reverie, and trip back to a very different place and time for him — in that case, is the ratatouille, the food itself, an allegory as well? Or is it just food? 

PINKAVA: 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.

So the restaurant critic loves the rat’s ratatouille, the rat loves to cook, and Jan Pinkava loves to tell stories about the human condition — sometimes in the form of an animated rat. I asked him if he thinks Ratatoulille may have shifted the public’s perception of rats.

PINKAVA: I hope it opens the 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. 

DUBNER: I often wonder whether the demonization of the rat is a little bit random, and/or driven by earlier pop-culture references. Because I think about the mouse — we had Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. Whereas rats, you know, we had Templeton from Charlotte’s Web, voiced by Paul Lynde, who was sinister. We had the film Willard, Rats are never the heroes.

PINKAVA: 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 is bigger, it’s scruffier, it’s got a longer nose. And it has that slightly disturbing, bald tail.

DUBNER: But these are all cosmetic differences. None of them are about the soul or the mood or the abilities. 

PINKAVA: They are. Now, what is wrong with us that we judge by appearances? Hmmm.

DUBNER: That’s a big question, isn’t it Jan? Yeah. I mean, do you have any solutions for that?

PINKAVA: Exposure. You got to see the thing that you judge as other early in life as just there, and it’s okay. 

DUBNER: And what’s your personal feeling today about rats? 

PINKAVA: 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, we have to remind ourselves that Jan Pinkava’s view of the rat — despite all his research — is a fictional rat. Remy is a chef, after all. And none of the rats in Ratatouille seem bound by the rat’s real lifespan of just two or three years. But is Pinkava’s view of the rat any less realistic than New York mayor Eric Adams’s view? He seems to see the rat as intentionally evil — rather than as just another animal hustling to survive, much like New Yorkers hustle to survive, and thrive. Neither of those views is very realistic. So what is a realistic view? Having now made these three episodes, I’d put it this way: the rat is the animal no one loves — until they do. So what’s your view of the rat? Let us know what you think — about this series, “Sympathy for the Rat,” or any of our episodes; you can reach us at radio@freakonomics.com. Big thanks to Jan Pinkava and everyone else who helped tell this story: Bethany Brookshire, Kathy Corradi, Bobby Corrigan, Ed Glaeser, Nils Stenseth, Robert Sullivan, Jessica Tisch, Karen Wickerson, and Julia Zichello.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This series was produced by Zack Lapinski with help from Dalvin Aboagye. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Jon Schnaars, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Sarah Lilley, and Theo Jacobs. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.