In Pixar’s new film “Ratatouille,” director Brad Bird wastes little time in plunging beneath the surface of a schizoid symbiotic world of rats that thrive on the waste of a mankind they fear and despise.

One young rodent dreamer named Remy (voiced by stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt) is sustained by more than just the compost and slops that the rest of his pack assaults with gusto. Remy has become enchanted by “Anyone Can Cook,” a discarded cookbook penned by deceased chef Auguste Gusteau. So much so, in fact, that Gusteau appears before Remy as a sort of ghostly Jiminy Cricket, exhorting the boy rodent to follow his heart’s desire.

Soon, Remy’s dream is to be a five-star chef, and the way for him to follow it is via his nose. Even in a garbage pile, Remy uses an advanced sense of smell and natural born high-wire culinary intuition to combine ingredients that romance and challenge the palate. But a chef’s brilliance only shines for those who have the good taste to appreciate creativity, and Remy’s father, Mustafa (John Ratzenberger), and the rest of his pack don’t value his evident genius.

When Remy is unexpectedly separated from his friends and family, he winds up in Paris via sewer and makes his way to his phantom mentor’s restaurant. Under the indifferent cooking and despotic rule of Gusteau’s former pupil Skinner (Ian Holm), a chef more interested in licensing TV dinners than wowing diners, the former five-star eatery has been demoted to just a single star. When a bungling new member of Skinner’s kitchen staff named Linguini (Lou Romano) accidentally sabotages a vat of soup, Remy can’t control his nascent professional pride. The chowder Remy creates on the fly, while risking the death sentence awaiting a rat found in a restaurant kitchen, is a sensation.

Linguini, the human who can’t even boil water, and Remy, the rat who always washes his paws before dashing off a perfect omelet, must become a team. The physical solution to how a rat can best supervise a human in the kitchen while remaining undetected provides a rich well of digitally rendered physical comedy, and the results of Remy and Linguini’s team effort put Gusteau’s back on the fine-dining map. It also puts the restaurant back in the crosshairs of Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O’Toole), the food critic who torpedoed Gusteau’s reputation.

To reveal more would endanger the many ingenious twists and reversals that enliven the film’s hopscotching chase scenes, reunions, and kitchen panics. Professional courtesy, however, compels me to point out that in a climactic showdown between chef and diner, my fellow (albeit fictional) critic Anton Ego forms the center of one of the most endearing and honest moments in the history of American film. I look forward to hearing the tears, sighs, and laughter that accompany this particular beat with a paying audience. It is the rare sound of people getting their $11 worth at the movies.

The thrift-store-painting Paris of “Ratatouille” is so fiercely gilded with high-resolution detail that it should be rated “T” for texture. “Feel purple, taste green,” screamed the one-sheet for Roger Corman’s venerable old drugsploitation movie “The Trip.” Unlike “The Trip,” “Ratatouille” makes good on Mr. Corman’s ballyhoo. Every one of the film’s vivid surfaces — jiggling aspics, dented copper pots, thinly sliced legumes, glass jars, turbid sewer water, and alternately sleek and bristling rat pelts — is rendered with a voluptuous tactility in colors you can almost feel and taste.

“Ratatouille” is a five-course kinetic feast as well as a visual one. Mr. Bird (who shot to computer-generated stardom with 2004’s “The Incredibles”) and his team have taken great care to digitally replicate many of the defining limitations of analogue camera techniques. Characters go in and out of focus, their first-person points of view come with zoom lens jerks, and some sequences alternate the characteristic side-to-side wobble of live-action photographed with a Steadicam with the smooth gliding of dolly tracks and cranes.

“100% Animation,” a legend in the film’s end credit says, promising that the filmmakers used “no motion capture or other shortcuts,” to bring “Ratatouille” to the screen. The film does, however, fall back on some script shortcuts. Lines like “You can’t change nature because change is nature — and it starts when we decide,” suggest that Mr. Bird may have resorted to grabs from an episode of “Dr. Phil.” There’s also something vaguely troubling about the film’s depiction of a strangely polarized food chain of gourmets and rats with nothing in between.

Yes, it’s a children’s movie, but Pixar films must be judged by the high standards of their predecessors, after all. “Toy Story II,” a harrowing epistemological freakout disguised as a Tom Hanks movie, sits alongside “The Godfather Part II” in the pantheon of sequels greater than their progenitors. “The Incredibles” trumped every other superhero movie made thus far by deftly tapping the graphicnovel zeitgeist and embedding superheroes in something like a realistic recent cultural history.

Unlike those films, the breathless and busy mixture in “Ratatouille” of rapid-fire chases, Civics 101 moralizing, and high-end foodie fetishism has slightly more execution brawn than narrative brain or character heart.

But, though its thematic bumper cars cars occasionally go in circles, the film’s good humor and frantic pace mostly keep things colliding and sparking pleasurably en route to a happy ending. On the whole, “Ratatouille” offers a hearty and satisfying movie meal for anyone feeling starved for imaginatively and lovingly crafted mainstream American entertainment.