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Then you've got the human characters — let's start with Linguini, a clumsy kitchen assistant voiced by Pixar artist Lou Romano. Lou was a production designer on The Incredibles. Why him and not an established actor?
It's really important to cast people who are perfect for the characters, not necessarily based on marquee value. Because animators feed off that. If the voice is rich and suggests a lot of things, that throws coal on the fire of their imagination for how to present it.

And it's extremely tedious work, animating.
What takes an actor five seconds to say, it may take an animator a month to animate.

A character named Colette also works in the kitchen of Gusteau's restaurant, and she's voiced with a strong French accent by, of all people, Janeane Garofalo.
Colette was a minor character with maybe three or four minutes of screen time, and maybe eight lines. I made her a major character. I watched this film being developed as part of that [advisers'] group, as I told you. I kept going, Why is Colette the only woman in the kitchen? Is this unusual? And research proved exactly what I wanted, which was that in the world of French cooking, counter to what we may think in America, women are the minority. They are discriminated against. Serious cooking is considered something for the men. And that worked tremendously for what I needed for the character.

So why Janeane for that voice?
She can convince you she's feisty and is not going to do anything she doesn't believe in, but she's also vulnerable underneath. Which is perfect for the character. The only question became, Can she do a convincing accent? She's a good actress and she did her homework. I think anyone seeing the movie cold, without knowing who's in it, would never guess that it's her.

You've also got John Ratzenberger, who's been in every Pixar film, playing a French waiter who happens to be named Mustafa. Not exactly a French-sounding name.
But see, that's another thing that's interesting, is that these kitchens are absolutely international. Go to any French [restaurant] kitchen, and it's a misfit band back there. They come from all parts of the world. Like Colette says, they're pirates, and they're proud of it.

The character of the self-satisfied food critic, Anton Ego — how did you come around to casting Peter O'Toole?
The moment I started writing Anton Ego, I heard Peter O'Toole. He's exactly who I was picturing. He has done almost no animation, so he took a bit of wooing, and I was just praying that he would say yes. He remembered doing some voice for some animated thing like 20 years ago, but it didn't really mean anything to him. He was like, ''Ewh, I think I did some sort of Nutcracker thing or something.'' He spoke about it like it was left-over string he'd found in the back of his dresser. Once he kind of came around and agreed to do [Ratatouille], he had a ball.

Did he find it odd adjusting to being alone in a recording booth, playing to air?
Some people you have to work with a little bit to get them to go to a heightened place that's not hammy. He got there in two seconds. He was able to pitch it perfectly for the medium.

Anton's office is a really intricate piece of design.
I had a really good time working with [production designer] Harley Jessup on that. It's meant to resemble a particularly nice coffin, because he's at a dead end [creatively]. He's facing his own portrait and his own reviews and awards. We even pushed it into the typewriter. If you look, it has a little skull design on it. Some people see it, some don't. But it's there.

One of the movie's major accomplishments is done so well, I don't think people will realize how difficult it must have been: The food all looks delicious. Even the title dish, ratatouille, makes you salivate. In most restaurants, ratatouille is a boring, humble vegetable stew. The Pixar artists make Remy's rendition of it look succulent.
That came out of a road our team first went down with Jan [Pinkava]. I certainly can't take credit for it, but I can say I really admire it. To make this food in the movie look edible, almost as if you can smell it, was a really a tough thing to do. The computer always wants to make things look like plastic.

So what's the project you put aside to do Ratatouille?
It's a live action movie, actually. And I'm about to go back toward that.

Can you talk more specifically about it?
No. It's way too early, but it's a really interesting idea and I'm really looking forward to working on it.

NEXT PAGE: Bird discusses Frank Miller's adaptation of The Spirit — and why animation is really for grown-ups

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