For those fans of Insanely Twisted Rabbits and Rex creator Michel Gagné you might have had a strange (or maybe not so strange) affinity for Pixar's Ratatouille. Well, maybe part of the attraction is attributed to Michel's involvement with the movie. Brad Bird apparently contacted Mr. Gagné in 2006 for the animations to "illustrate potential ideas of how the taste could be visualized in an abstract way".

Over at Gagné International, Michel runs through his process for creating the animations eventually used in the movie. What's beautiful is seeing how much thought went into what was used for the abstract visualization, Michel "wrote down all the musical cues on elaborate spreadsheets" and eventually ended up with around 1400 hand drawings for each animation!

You can visit the project page over at Gagné International for lots of colorful pictures, full rundown of his process, and even the finished animations (before and after the characters where inserted).

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