Listen to This Fabulously Produced Musical Version of Pixar’s Ratatouille

Ratatouille is among our favorite Pixar animated features, and with good reason. Brimming with heart, it’s the story of a talented, misunderstood young rat named Remy who is separated from his family and strikes out into the big city of Paris with a dream—to become a great chef, despite the limitations of being an unwanted rat in a human-dominated world. Featuring charming performances from Patton Oswalt and others, along with mouthwatering animation of the secret world inside professional kitchens, it’s an infinitely re-watchable delight that stands among Pixar’s best in any proper ranking. But one thing that Ratatouille never featured was original songs.

That’s no longer true. A duo of theatrical composers named Dan and Laura Curtis began writing some Broadway-style tunes for Ratatouille as a lark, and if their recent reddit post is to be believed, everything sort of snowballed from there. Or as they put it: “So we decided to write some songs to make Disney’s Ratatouille into a musical… got carried away, got an orchestra… and cast of West End performers…this is what we did!”

Behold, the closing number, “Anyone Can Cook Finale.”

Pretty damn good, right? Someone tells you, “we threw together some Broadway-style numbers for fun,” and you hardly expect to hear a whole orchestra and choir going to town on a song that sounds ripped right out of a touring production of a nonexistent Disney musical. Somebody get these guys cracking on the full version of Ratatouille: The Musical, stat!

It’s not even the only song that the duo produced for Ratatouille, either. They have four of these songs on their YouTube page, which originally went up 8 months ago and apparently didn’t receive a ton of attention at the time. That seems likely to change now, and the productions really deserve some listeners—they were a four-month project on a “tiny budget,” which the creators presumably fronted themselves. Kudos to them for seeking out the talented professionals needed to make this unexpected Disney pipe dream into a reality.

The other three Ratatouille songs can be viewed at the duo’s YouTube channel, right here. Oh, what the hell—here’s another one, a duet between Remy and Linguini as the pair first hatch their plan to work as a team in the kitchen.