This must be foodie heaven. I’m in the gastro-temple L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Covent Garden in London, on my plate is toast topped with minced pigs’ trotters, and across the table is Brad Bird, the director of the film that has been described by the chef Anthony Bourdain as “quite simply the best food movie yet made”. Bourdain, the food writer with a big, brawling literary style akin to hurling kitchen knives at the page, gushed enthusiastically on a food blog about Ratatouille, Bird’s latest animation for Pixar, describing a reaction of “surprise, delight, awe and even a measure of enlightenment”. Brad Bird, you assume, is a man who clearly knows his onions.

But, as he wrestles a quivering finger of pink flesh out of his langoustine, Bird denies any serious gourmet inclinations. “I love good food, but I don’t know very much about it.

People assume that I do after this film. I know more than I did when I started. One of the good things about being a writer and a director is that you have permission to go into all these different areas and learn. It’s kind of your job to do so. And I had to learn very fast on this film.”

Bird’s third feature film, after The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, Ratatouille is the first idea that he didn’t originate himself. The story of a sewer rat called Remy who aspires to greatness as a chef in Paris, it was the brainchild of the Czech animator Jan Pinkava. Bird stepped in at the behest of Pixar studio heads when it became clear that the project and its script were in serious trouble. It’s a challenge, he says, that he wouldn’t have considered approaching were it not for his experience of working to the strict deadlines and quick turnover of television on The Simpsons.

However troubled its genesis, the finished film is a glorious creation. Seemingly disparate ingredients – haute cuisine, creative fulfilment, rodents – come together in a symphony of brilliantly realised action sequences, comic set-pieces and genuine pathos. Little Remy is invested with the physical expressiveness of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd; Paris is painted in such evocative, saturated hues, you can almost smell the city. The preposterous premise – that a rat and a kitchen boy could form an alliance that produces a culinary revolution – is given a certain plausibility by the meticulous attention to detail.

“Realism isn’t important to us, but authenticity and feasibility is,” says the head animator Dylan Brown. “It’s something that’s rooted in the culture of Pixar, to do a lot of research.”

For Bird, who joined the project when it was already under way, the research consisted of just one trip to Paris. Which is probably just as well. “I nearly died on that trip. We had to hit a number of really great restaurants in a short period of time. But, coming from America, if you put a small plate in front of me and everything is delicious, I’ll eat everything on the plate. You can’t do that at these restaurants because you’ll get full, and you’re only a third of the way through the meal. They had to roll me home.”

Meanwhile, Brown and his fellow animators took cookery lessons, recreated dishes from the film and spent an evening in the kitchen of the Michelin-starred restaurant the French Laundry, which proved invaluable for the authenticity of the kitchen scenes. “It was an opportunity to learn a lot about something that I love,” says Brown. “Even something as a simple as chopping onions – learning how to do it properly was just so cool.”

A gastronomic odyssey, complete with a celebrity chef, an all-powerful restaurant critic and a mission statement that nobody should have to eat junk, Ratatouille seems very timely, especially compared with Pixar’s somewhat misjudged last film. The petrol-headed Cars looked like a gas-guzzling monster truck parked on screens next to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth last year. But little Remy, with his refined palate and passion for quality, seems to be in tune with a world where slow food rather than fast food is the new ideal.

“If a kid is going to watch a film 100 times, I’d rather they get a good message,” says Brown. “I’ve heard so many stories about kids watching the film and then wanting to try a mushroom, having never eaten a mushroom before.”

Considered a tough sell by Pixar standards in America – apparently US audiences couldn’t pronounce the title – the film went on to do solid business, but if the response in France is anything to go by, it is Europe that really has an appetite for Ratatouille. “It did really well in France,” Bird says. “I’m not sure why. It’s not meant to be a perfect recreation of Paris, it’s meant to be the impression of Paris. And they went with it. I was happy that we were able to do some gentle ribbing of the French and they laughed at it. They don’t take themselves so seriously that they can’t enjoy joking about their country occasionally.”

That Ratatouille charmed both French audiences and France’s notoriously sniffy critics perhaps should notcome as a surprise. France takes animation very seriously; it was recently announced that the French entry for the Foreign Language Oscar is Persepolis, an animated film about a young girl growing up in Iran.

Bird is the first to admit that American animation is not taken as seriously as it might be because much of it tends to pander to the lowest common denominator. Ask him what he dislikes about current animation and he reels off a bitter list. “Look, we did our fair share of pop references in The Simpsons, but that was in the context of a show that was commenting on the day a lot. Often I find that films just reference whatever is hot at the moment the film is made and the joke is stale when the movie opens. There’s something lazy about it.”

Bird’s next project has already been the subject of much speculation. An adaptation of 1906, James Dalessandro’s novel set against the backdrop of the San Francisco earthquake, the project will be Bird’s first live-action film. He also says that a sequel to The Incredibles is not out of the question. “I muse about it. I have maybe half a movie in my mind. But I don’t want to do it just because people liked the first one, I would have to feel that I was going somewhere new.”

Ratatouille is released nationwide on Friday

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