After the less than universally admired "Cars," Pixar's eighth feature sees the Disney-owned toon studio in very fine form, and confirms Bird's reputation as one of the medium's most engaging storytellers. Compared to his woefully underseen "The Iron Giant" and Oscar-winning "The Incredibles," "Rata-touille" may be smaller in scope, but in telling the story of a very smart rat striving to enter the very human world of French haute cuisine, it shares with its predecessors an affinity for gifted outsiders seeking personal fulfillment.

Pic also extends two of the great themes of "The Incredibles": the pursuit of excellence over mediocrity (a standard that has long distinguished Pixar from rivals and imitators) and the importance -- or rather, the unavoidability -- of family ties. Remy, a thin blue rat who lives with his unruly rodent clan in the French countryside, finds himself torn between these two commitments as the film opens.

Ratatouille has negative virtues, too. Pop-culture pokes and nudges, so tiresome in the DreamWorks cartoons and Pixar's Cars, are mercifully absent; neither are there any obtrusive movie-star voices. There's an odd sprinkling of French characters who are presumably speaking French but with a French accent, and Colette's accent is a little too thick, sometimes getting in the way of a joke. In general, though, the voices seem to have been chosen with the characters clearly in mind, in the manner of the early Disney features, and certainly not for the voice actors' marquee value.