Wait till I get my paws on you ...

How did a French rat who's a whizz in the kitchen become a hit in the land of the Big Mac?

The animated movie Ratatouille, which has just been released in America, is a work of wonder and surprise as well as joy. The first surprise is that it has been beating Die Hard 4.0 at the US box office. More surprisingly, the inhabitants of the land of 'Freedom Fries' are piling in to see a movie about cooking set in, gulp, Paris, in which the hero is a street rat blessed with the culinary skills of Gordon Ramsay.

I wish I had been a fly on the wall when they pitched this to the executives at Disney. The United States of Super Size Me hungry for the art of food appreciation? A rodent as the chef? None of the elements quite fit. Except it all does, with a well poised script, technical prowess and timely pertinence not seen since Walt Disney's 1940 masterpiece Fantasia. The similarities between the two films are startling. Both films are at the cutting edge of the technology of their era. Fantasia was the first time audiences had heard stereo sound, and the CGI animation in Ratatouille is the most exquisite I have ever seen. There is, for example, a sequence in which the entire family of rats is flushed down to a river, and we follow the hero as he nearly drowns, dipping under the surface of the water and back up again. The rendering of the water in the moonlight is amazing, creating an effect that made me gasp for air and adjectives.

In serving up this Michelin-starred confection, director Brad Bird (who also made The Incredibles) deserves an Oscar. If the scene in which a hardened and bitter food critic (voiced by Peter O'Toole) is shown as a little boy standing in his mother's kitchen doesn't make you cry, see a doctor. Pixar Pictures have yet again confirmed their position as a 21st-century equivalent of the da Vinci workshop.

The film's main character, Remy, is a lowly rat who harbours the unlikely dream of becoming a top-class chef. The first obstacle against Remy achieving his dream is his conformist and conservative father who is suspicious of all humans and thinks that 'food is fuel' - it just needs to get you going. This view is compatible with the fast-food ideology that holds sway in America today, regarding food as sustenance, almost a necessary evil. Ratatouille suggests that passion for cooking and for fine food is the most interesting thing about eating, not as a physical need, but more as a spiritual end in itself. Remy would rather go hungry than eat junk food. This rat who has a cultured palate embraces values of openess and elitism that seem contrary to the defining characteristics of Bush's America. For those of us who object to the coarser aspects of American culture, or its political behaviour, the film is a reminder of just how much there is to love about the country.

In Ratatouille, Gusteau, the greatest chef in France, has a simple dictum: 'Anyone can cook.' I agree. We are all capable of appreciating greatness, if not actually creating it ourselves. We may not all be great artists (Gusteau's son is a hopeless chef but eventually reveals his hidden talents as a brilliant waiter) but we can all be touched by greatness. The way to do that is to follow Remy's example and aim high.

· Ratatouille is released in the UK on 5 October