Ratatouille (2007) - 7 questions

Question: There are usually references to the next Pixar film in the film (Nemo in Monsters, Inc, Mr. Incredible in Nemo, Toy Story 3 bear in Up). Is there anything from Wall-e in Ratatouille?

Answer: Not in the Ratatouille movie itself, however on the DVD/Blu-ray there is a short about how rats are our friends and there is a sequence about how rats will follow us into space, the driver of one of the shuttles is Wall-E himself.

Question: John Ratzenburger is known as Pixar's lucky charm, appearing in every Pixar movie. (Ham in all the Toy Stories, Underminer in The Incredibles, Mac in Cars). Who does he voice in Ratatouille?

Answer: He voices Mustafa the waiter.

Question: Something I have always wondered. At the end of the movie, Remy has hundreds of rats cooking the food with him. However, Remy is the rat in the whole flock with a real ability to know how to cook. How did all of the rats cook the food with great ability if they have no cooking experience at all? Remy couldn't have taught them all how to cook or what to do for the recipes.

Answer: He doesn't need to teach them every recipe, just give each one specific tasks to do, like assembly-line workers.

Question: Does anyone know anything about the theory that chefs hats represents the number of ways that they know how to prepare eggs? If this is correct, then why is Linguini allowed to wear a chef's hat when he, in fact, isn't one? Wouldn't he be wearing a different hat?

Answer: This is a legend, which states that the number of pleats on a chef's hat (or toque) represents the number of ways that they know how to prepare an egg. There's certainly no evidence that it's actually true - it would be highly impractical if it were, requiring a chef to get a replacement every time they learned a new method. Regardless, many toques are made with exactly 100 pleats, supposedly based on the idea that there are 100 ways to prepare an egg, however, chefs wear them regardless of their culinary skill in that department.

Question: How did Remy know that Ego would want ratatouille as his meal? It couldn't have been that Remy lived in the house during the flashback because the flashback is from too long ago for Remy to have been born.

Answer: He didn't. He's playing a hunch. Ego's used to high-class food, chefs plying him with their most up-to-date haute cuisine - he gets that all the time. Remy's guessing that giving him a simple traditional meal, albeit presented in a style appropriate to a high-class restaurant, will work well; something that proves to be correct.

Question: Is Chef Skinner named for B. F. Skinner, the noted psychologist who did experiments with rats?

Answer: According to the IMDb: yes, he was.

Question: When Linguini brings Remy to his apartment for the first time and Linguini falls asleep on the couch, there is an old movie playing on the television. Is this little segment we see about dreaming in Paris a nod to an actual movie or is it just something the Pixar team made up?

Answer: The film is 1945's "Brief Encounter" - see: http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0037558/.