Why is Hollywood so obsessed with talking rats?
There is a passage in Steve Bakers book Imagine the beast which asks the reader to close their eyes and think about how animals feature in our culture. Baker points out that, rather than imagining real living animals, the reader is likely to see representations of them: animals on television or in books. When I follow Bakers instructions, I only see rodents. Cartoon rodents, in particular: Remy the rat; Stuart Little the mouse; Templeton the huge anatomically perfect CGI rat, which makes me suspicious of how the animation team performed their work on the live version of Charlottes canvas. Rodents are very common in our audiovisual culture. Leading actors from Willem Dafoe to Hugh Jackman have all tried to voice animated rats, while Michael J. Fox defeated Bill Murray to play a mouse who dresses like a boy at your local skatepark. Even TikTok is swallowed up by rodents, creators using the hashtag #rattok to show their furry friends. *  No discussion of the cultural relevance of rodents would be complete without a mention of Mickey Mouse. The character, now an instantly recognizable emblem of the Disney corporation, was designed in 1925 due to Legal issue with Mickeys predecessor, Oswald the Rabbit. Mickey was in part inspired by Walt Disneys own experiments with a mouse in one of his studios, although in large part Mickey was simply a modified version of Oswalds original design. In that sense, the creation and popularity of Mickey Mouse raises more questions than it answers. Well, Mickey is not really a mouse. It is the product of anthropomorphism, where humans project their own characteristics onto animals; he has long human legs and wears clothes like his successors, Stuart Little and the mouse Matthew Broderick (The Legend of Despereaux). same Ratatouilles Remy, who is less anthropomorphic, stands on his hind legs and has cartoonish eyes that allow him to express his emotions like a human. While it can be said of other animals, the rodent protagonists dominate Hollywood, rivaling only cats and dogs who hold unequivocally positive status in society. But the actual perception of rodents is still largely negative, as seen historically in films like Willard (1971) and currently in the news. In December 2020, The sun warned of a ratmageddonAt Christmas, while in March of this year The Guardian reported on a biblical rat plague in eastern Australia. Hollywood cant change the bad press, they can use it to their advantage. Any animal can be anthropomorphized, but the largely negative perception of rodents offers writers the opportunity to create stories with rodent protagonists that parallel the experience of marginalized and persecuted communities in the human world. At Don Bluth An american tail, mice are used to explore the experience of Russian Jewish immigrants when they emigrate from Shostka to the United States. In Distant, there is a clear exploration of the class: Roddy from the upper class is forced into the sewers, where the working class rats live. When Roddy decides to stay in the sewers, the moral of the story becomes clear: 1) friends and family trump material possessions, and, 2) dont be an arrogant little Knightsbridge, I mean, rat. Academics like Laure Murat even suggested that Ratatouilles Remy is a queer coded character. Rmy rejects the heteronormativity of his family to become a chef who operates by pulling Linguinis hair under his hat, an ingenious reorganization of the closet. When Rmy becomes a full-fledged chef, Ratatouille becomes the story of a successful coming out. Rodents offer the ultimate story of the outsider, a narrative that dominates Hollywood cinema. They are physically small, which gives filmmakers the opportunity to represent the physical world from a new perspective (see: the absurd The great mouse detective). They occupy a liminal space in society where they are both pets and parasites, and are instantly recognizable as these two things. We can also say that they are useful for introducing concepts around marginalization to young audiences. Its hard not to wonder, however, why its easier for Hollywood to put a soup-making rat on screen than, say, the real people theyre meant to represent. And this is not limited to rodents; representation within Hollywood cinema, especially animation, has always been an uphill battle. A Duke University study of the 100 class-oriented childrens films found that only 4% of the main characters could be classified as poor. Of the 23 films made by Pixar since 1995, Soul (2020) is the first on a black person. Cinema is a mirror of our own society; movies like Courageous (2012), Moana (2016) and Soul (2020) reflect contemporary concerns about inclusiveness and representation. At the same time, the rodent protagonists gradually fell into the water. Since the peak of rodent mania in the mid to late 2000s (where Distant and Ratatouille came out in the same 12 months), the genre has declined. The last major entry was the review The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature (2017), who doesnt really use rodents as an allegory for real-world problems, but exploits the novelty of talking animals. The decline of rodent cinema and the increase in representation is not a direct correlation. Rodent films, however, are an important part of the evolution of Hollywood, from metaphorical stories of persecution to those that are more literal. The emphasis here is on the word more: using animals as a vector of societal problems is obviously still tempting for some (* cough * Zootopia). As Pixar has gone from non-human characters like Lightning McQueen in Cars (2006) to films like coco (2017)  where real people take the lead  their addiction to animal tropes always creeps through the cracks. Although the central figure of Soul is Black, he spends much of the film trapped in a cats body. The same goes for Disneys first attempt at Indigenous portrayal, Brother Bear (2003), where, for the majority of the film, the central character is stuck like a bear. And in The princess and the Frog (2009), which gave us Disneys first Black Princess, Tiana herself spends a lot of the time running as a frog.