With a nod to Cartoon Brew for featuring it earlier in the week - Todd Vaziri, compositing supervisor at ILM, has a great piece on the use of the dolly zoom in Pixar’s Ratatouille.

My first exposure to the dolly zoom was Steven Spielberg's “Jaws”. I nearly burned out my VHS copy of the film, rewinding its dolly zoom shot over and over again to study the effect. Many years later I saw Alfred Hitchcock's “Vertigo”, which many regard as the origin of the technique in popular cinema.

The subtle dolly zoom in Brad Bird's “Ratatouille”, [is] one of my favorite uses of the technique in the last decade.

Why do I find this use of the dolly zoom in “Ratatouille” so brilliant?  For one, most audiences did not even consciously realize the effect was occurring because a critical piece of the emotional core of the film was being delivered to the audience.

Read the full in-depth look at the shot on Vaziri's blog.