And Disney didn’t drip rat-poison on the idea. It was as if, with Broadway shuttered, there was an outbreak of fevered imagination in a parallel universe that fed back into the real world. People began posting new songs, directors posting how they would stage it, choreographers dancing, set designers presenting mock-ups”. That received a million views and prompted a pile-on of creative effort.Īs he explains: “From there, it was fast and furious. New York composer Daniel Mertzlufft developed Jacobsen’s offering into a grand Disney finale. When an elementary school teacher called Emily Jacobsen posted a catchy round of an unfinished ditty she’d composed in praise of Remy, rendered in a distorted squeaky voice, it inspired users to fixate on what a full-blown musical of the film might be like. Very short daft DIY videos – sampled music, synchronised dance moves – abound, and rebound, in the ultimate meme-generator. But – a favoured app for the tweens and teens of Generation Z (those born between the mid-90s and 2010) – TikTok exudes a welcome playfulness.

Social media gets a bad rap, and for good reason (of toxicity). Somehow, the usual arduous process of individually centred labour – entailing workshops, rewrites and angst galore – appears to have been spontaneously bypassed, perhaps pointing the way for a new era of collaborative musical-making. Such was the demand to see it that this “concert” benefit premiere has raised more than $1m for actors and behind-the-scenes workers (via the Actors Fund).Ī “grand projet” by Pixar/Disney? Mais non it was crowd-sourced – the product of a riot of collective endeavour arising from a humble TikTok video going viral in August. Has the most significant American musical of the year already happened? The word “phenomenon” is used with giddy abandon about cultural happenings, but it has a tang of truth in the case of Ratatouille the musical – or Ratatousical, as some are calling it.īased on the much-loved 2007 Pixar/Disney animated feature – about a sensitive, morsel-savouring rat called Remy who develops a rare culinary aptitude (thereafter taking the world of Parisian haute cuisine by storm) – it landed on New Year’s Day for a 72-hour window of streaming opportunity.

Ratatouille the musical soundtrack