A look at the brilliance of Ratatouille the Musical
If you have been anywhere near the social media of a theatre kid in the past four weeks, you are likely familiar with the Ratatouille musical. A crowdsourced production involving creators from across the globe, what started as a one-off joke has blossomed into a full-blown phenomenon, with hundreds of videos racking up millions of views from adoring observers.
But what is Ratatouille the Musical? I sat down with 5 of the TikTok creators responsible to parse out just what has made Ratatouille the darling of up and coming musical theatre fans.
(For the digitally distant, TikTok is a video sharing social media app that operates using an algorithm to construct a viewer's homepage. Anyone’s video can be plucked from obscurity and be put before millions of viewers, with very little transparency as to why a video is put on the front page.)
Em Jaccs, a 26-year-old teacher in New York City was the genesis of the movement.
“I posted my video in August, and never expected it to go this far. I had been looking at an article about the new Ratatouille ride in EPCOT, so that put the movie in my mind and I just started singing my own made-up song about the main character of the movie, Remy, while I was cleaning up around my apartment. It really got stuck in my head and I decided it might be fun to put in on TikTok and send it to my family to annoy them. I just wasn't too fond of how my voice sounded so I sped up the recording so my voice sounded a little more cartoon-like and added as many crazy effects as I could. I thought it was funny and sent it off to my family and pretty much forgot about it.”
“I forgot about it until early October when I started getting tons of notifications regarding the video. A creator had used the song in her own video that got the attention of TikTok star Brittany Broski.”
One of the key features of TikTok is a user’s ability to bring the sound from another user's video into a new video - someone might post a video dancing to a specific song, and people will use the same song to do their own version of the dance, with the sound traveling far across the platform even if the original video never hits the front page.
Within days, the video using Em’s sound garnered more than half a million views, with Brittany Broski’s audience flocking to the absurdist nature of the song. Among that audience was Daniel Mertzlufft, a composer orchestrator and arranger with experience in the TikTok Musical Theatre community. His video parodying New York Summer by Louisa Melcher had blown up a few short weeks before ‘Ode to Remy’ had begun to gain traction.“
“I hadn’t been doing as much during to COVID, so I began applying creative inspiration to TikTok songs. A friend of mine who is known for his viral video “I’m an Accountant” tagged me in Em’s video, and I knew I had to give it the full Disney/Broadway orchestration and arrangement.”
“I did full orchestrations, and a friend and I sang as a 16 part ensemble; it just gives you the feeling of a real, fully produced musical. Since it’s clearly a parody, over-producing it in the way I did makes it even funnier because it’s clearly a joke, but you still get emotional.”
While Em’s original video had been a slow burn, Daniel’s arrangement exploded almost immediately. It became one of the most used sounds on the platform, with countless videos using the song reaching the front page of users across the world. One such user was Gabbi Bolt, an Australian singer-songwriter.
“Honestly to me, a Ratatouille Musical made perfect sense. Ratatouille is one of my favorites from the Pixar series, and I thought this was a cute little trend. What I love in musical theatre is how there’s always that one really killer song for the slightly minor character, like in Shrek the Musical when Gingy gets the solo in Freak Flag, I love those underdog songs, and so I decided to write one for Remy’s dad, to set up the show. You have to understand what Remy’s life is before it changes, and so I thought a parental advisory situation handled it best.”
“Being Australian means that if something blows up in America, you fall asleep with a couple hundred likes, and wake up to 80,000 likes. It was bonkers.”
Suddenly the Ratatouille trend wasn’t just about how catchy Em’s song and Daniel’s arrangement had been - now, people were making content that expanded the scope of the musical into an actual score. Hundreds of thousands of different videos popped up in less than a week, with the hashtag ratatouillemusical quickly passing more than 10 million views. Blake Rouse, a 17-year-old from Colorado got wind of the project and threw his hat into the ring as one of the potential songwriters.
“I saw a video of a user suggesting what she would like to see in the show - I had actually never seen the movie until I wanted to start writing music for the show. The user was listing off suggestions that she wanted to see, and she mentioned that she wanted to see a tango between Linguini and Colette (the two human protagonists of the film), and I thought that would be the most fun to write.
When you have a TikTok page, it goes through ups and downs, and I was definitely in a down when I put out my video. My views were down, and I wasn’t getting traffic on the front page. I didn’t really expect it to get anywhere, I edited the video and posted it after working on it for a day, and within an hour I saw that it was going to be one of my biggest videos. Multiple people asked me to post a version that they could duet as Colette, and that video exploded. There were people getting three times the likes I got on my original video just by dueting it, and it spread everywhere.”
The duet feature on TikTok allows users to make videos incorporating another user’s video by placing the two side by side - in Blake’s case, thousands of people dueted his video to perform their own interpretation of the material he had written for Colette. This type of collaboration, with one person writing a song and multiple people discovering and recording their own versions, has become par for the course in the Ratatouille Musical community. While many had joked about the possibility of a TikTok musical one day coming to Broadway, Ratatouille was suddenly starting to feel a bit more real.
“I do TikToks where I take choral versions of WAP or other TikTok trend songs, and I lipsync to them while wearing all of my wigs to make it look like we’re rehearsing TikTok the Musical.” JJ Niemann, a furloughed swing performer from the Broadway production of The Book of Mormon weighed in. “In this case, it was Ratatouille the Musical. I made a fake rehearsal video of it and was taken aback by how many views it got. When I made my video Daniel’s arrangement only had 25,000 views or so, and mine blew up and crossed 1.5 million.”
With this phenomenon growing across the app at a staggering speed, one thing was abundantly clear - Ratatouille the Musical, and the 2007 film that inspired it, had become a meme. Gen Z, the largest demographic on TikTok, flocked to any content about Remy and the other characters, with many staking claims on favorite characters. But why?
“Honestly, I think everyone is bored.” JJ laughed. “TikTok loves random things. Things that don’t make sense will just come out of nowhere.” Daniel agreed, referencing how Gen Z humor values chaotic inside jokes, but the trends originator, Em, had a more nuanced take.
“The pandemic has brought on so many types of struggles for people. Having to quarantine in homes and having a lack of natural social interaction has been mentally taxing. When this idea of creating a Ratatouille musical started to go viral, it offered an opportunity to be part of something bigger. Gen Z especially has grown up in a technologically advanced time, however, this pandemic has highlighted the fact that the internet alone cannot entertain us forever. I know I can't be the only one who has experienced getting to all social media platforms and being shown "you're up to date." Gen Z and others are discovering true boredom for maybe the first time. The idea of the Ratatouille musical offers a chance to collaborate towards a common goal and has become an outlet for creativity.”
As of publishing, the Ratatouille Musical trend shows no signs of slowing down, with new material being added to the project on all sides. Composers across the globe putting their spin on different characters, designers are constructing set models, and fashion aficionados are designing potential costume plots. An account by the name of @RatatouilleMusical has sprung up, with dreams of compiling the community's hard work into an actual production in the near future.
Josh Abram, the owner of the @ratatouillemusical account, has experience in the digital theatre arena - as a cast member of RENT on Smule (Smule is an online karaoke app) he had figured out the kinks of online musical theatre, and when the Ratatouille trend took off, he knew he had to be a part of making it a reality.
“At first glance, it sounds a little silly, but after listening to a smorgasbord of ideas it only made sense that this story was full of potential to become a theatrical production.”
Online musicals have seen a sharp increase in popularity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but companies such as Starkid Productions have found success for nearly a decade in the digital parody musical format - their musicals parodying the Harry Potter series have racked up more than 54 million views since first premiering in 2009, with only a few small copyright snags in their effort to remain under the fair use doctrine.
In United States copyright law, pieces of copyrighted material can be repurposed without violation, provided the material has been altered in some significant fashion - Weird Al Yankovic’s song parodies are an example of Parody Fairy Use in action. Abram hopes to use the same precedent to create Ratatouille the Musical.
“We’re currently aiming to release a conceptual album, in hopes that it will then lead us to fill in the rest of the blanks. Our team is diligently working to ensure that we are playing by the rules, using only what is fair use, and making changes where necessary. We may slightly be leaning more towards a parody production, as there are laws in place that could cover us in those areas. Our goal is to not recreate the film, but rather create something original inspired by it.”
Of course, this is almost certainly a long shot - the Walt Disney Company has a long history of sending cease and desists when their properties are used by people outside of the Disney Theatricals umbrella, and many of the creators on TikTok are waiting with bated breath for the movement to catch the attention of their legal team.
One option that many creators are hoping for is Disney picking up the idea themselves. Within the Disney Parks, there are a number of 40 to 60-minute shows for park attendees to view. So much goodwill and earnest love for the property has been built up in the last month; implementing some version of Ratatouille the Musical at the parks would be a surefire way to get teens and twenty-somethings to consider a visit to Disney once it is safe to return to a crowded theme park.
After all, with the building of the new Ratatouille Ride at EPCOT, it wouldn’t hurt to make Remy the Rat of Disney’s Dreams.
Em Jaccs, the original creator of Ode to Remy, may be reached on her tiktok @e_jaccs.
Daniel Mertzlufft, the orchestrator and arranger of the Musical Theatre soundscape, may be reached on his tiktok @danieljmertzlufft
Josh Abram, the founder of @ratatouillemusical may be reached on the eponymous tiktok.
Gabbi Bolt, the composer of Remy’s father, may be reached on her website https://www.gabbibolt.com/ . Her first EP, Grey into Blue, is available now.
Blake Rouse, the composer of the Linguini and Colette Tango, may be reached on his website https://www.blakerouse.com/ . His album Blake Sings Public Domain Christmas Songs is available now.
JJ Niemann, the creator of the Ratatouille Rehearsal Room, may be reached on his website https://www.jjniemann.com/
We will continue to follow this movement as it glides toward actualization.
Update: In the weeks since this piece was originally published, the movement has been acknowledged by Patton Oswalt (original voice of Remy), Brad Bird (director of Ratatouille the animated film), Pixar, and the Disney Channel, with actor Milo Manheim performing a submission for the musical at the site of a Ratatouille-themed ride at Walt Disney World. Articles have been published by Rolling Stone and the New York Times, and the movement has picked up an unprecedented amount of steam, with Broadway’s Kevin Chamberlin and Andrew Barth Feldman throwing their hat in the ring to be a member of the cast.
Margaret Hall is a Musical Theatre Historian and teacher. She can be reached @stardustschild for question or comment.