Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter has shut down calls for a live-action remake of the 2007 animated film Ratatouille.
During the worldwide press tour for Challengers earlier this year, actor Josh O’Connor regularly spoke about his love for Pixar’s culinary film, leading fans to start a social media campaign to get him to play the lead in a live-action remake.
However, during an interview with Time on Tuesday, Docter insisted Pixar will never consider remaking their projects.
“No, and this might bite me in the butt for saying it, but it sort of bothers me,” he shared. “I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves. To remake it, it’s not very interesting to me personally.”
In the social media campaign for O’Connor’s casting, fans had noted the British actor’s resemblance to Ratatouille’s lead human character Alfredo Linguini, a kitchen worker who teams up with a rat named Remy to help him achieve his dream of becoming a chef.
Docter revealed he wasn’t aware of the fan campaign and noted that it would be “tough” to revolve a story around a live-action rat.
He then went on to use Pixar’s 2009 film Up as an example to explain how the worlds of animation and live-action don’t “translate very easily”.
“So much of what we create only works because of the rules of the (animated) world,” he said. “So if you have a human walk into a house that floats, your mind goes, ‘Wait a second. Hold on. Houses are super heavy. How are balloons lifting the house?’ But if you have a cartoon guy and he stands there in the house, you go, ‘Okay, I’ll buy it.'”
