Ratatouille, a new movie from Pixar Studios, is a wonderful story about Remy, a rat who—inspired by a book titled Anyone Can Cook—sets out to become a gourmet French chef. Substitute any other seemingly impossible dream for the word "cook" and you have the general theme of the movie. The inspiring ending more than makes up for some slow pacing earlier in the film.

What makes the movie so special is that Remy’s ordinariness and “rat-ness” give him an appreciation for the simple, common, and ordinary aspects of food. When he chooses to cook ratatouille—dismissed in the movie as a “peasant food”—in the movie’s climactic scene, he has intuitively chosen the perfect dish for the moment.

Many of the scenes in Ratatouille, which I went to see over the weekend, are just amazing. The French gourmet kitchen where Remy, the rat with culinary dreams, ends up working is an elaborate, highly kinetic—even breath-taking—environment. Scenes of Paris at night are rendered more beautiful even than reality. And Peter O'Toole's voice-over for the critic Anton Ego is superb.

A section in my book, Cosmic Trends, is about how cinema today has much in common astrologically with the explosive inventiveness of movies in the 1920’s. When I wrote the book, I had a lot of fun researching Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton (about whom I wrote astrological profiles) and watching classic movies like Keaton’s The General (a movie about a train and not an army general, and #18 on AFI’s recently updated list of the 100 best movies of all time). The wizardry in movies today is equivalent in many ways to the early days of American cinema. A lot of this is due, once again, to the influence of Uranus in Pisces, where it was also placed during the 1920’s. Pisces and Neptune have to do with the fantasy and glamour of movies, while Uranus is projection, invention, and technology. I think that movies like Ratatouille demonstrate how the digital revolution has helped lift movie-making into a new era.

This is not to slight the influence on animation of Walt Disney (who had Neptune and Pluto straddling his Midheaven and the Moon in his 1st house)—what child’s heart has not been broken by the shooting of Bambi’s mother? Or soared with Dumbo’s flying?