I'll start by giving you my arguement, cause maybe thats not clear. I am not saying that the other movies are bad. I am saying that some things in ratatullie were revolutionary. And unfortunately I cannot provide you with internet sources for that opinion, because I got them from my roommate, who I beleive may have a greater insight on the issue then some film critic website, a timeline that includes nothing of the CGI developments after the the 80s and includes things like steve jobs buy pixar(not exactly CG development related), and a wikipedia timeline that excludes things like episode 2 with the first use of all blue screen. Infact there are alot of things missing from the 2000s in the wiki website.
that was quite the post, I appreciate the time and effort put into it. I wont go throught quote by quote but I'll hit the major issues here.
Firstly, my impressions come from what I see as being really interesting I have an arts(visual graphics i.e. sketching, painting), biology and engineering background so I have alot of appreciation for some of the thought that goes on behind creating the effects, and making them life like. My opinions on ratatullie come from my roommate who like i said is doing masters work in the feild.
Now I am not saying that Pixar is god, however anything that is published in a paper is new PERIOD, that I can tell you for a fact, as I am doing research right now and have some appreciation for publishing papers(even though I am in a different field the same standards are applied). The link you provided was a list of revolutionary things done from a cinimatic point of veiw. Some of the things from what I gather in Ratatullie were things like the physics and rendering of choping vegtables, and as I mentioned before there was the object impact deformation. Things like this aren't going to wow the audience because they are small things that are expected where if i didn't point them out to you, you wouldnt notice right away cause they're very subtile. Be that as it may it does not change the fact that they are things that have not been done before, and are still in some sense revolutionary.
When your dealing with papers its not quite the same as reading a discription of a product. Abstracts are not sales pitches, they are meant to explain the real relevence and outline of what is in the paper. They are peer reviewed so you don't just get a company spouting out grabage just to make themselves look good. I am not sure what more you want from me. Its not about the quantity of sources but the quality. I just happened to send you a link with all the papers on it. Would you like links for all the seperate papers?
I will make this concession. The stuff done in ratatuille, isn't as insanely revolutionary as say. Making a dinosaur, but you have to realise that the days of those kinds of steps are gone. All future revolutionary advances will be small things that improve the physics, feel, and realism of the effects. Most of these won't be specifically noticed by people unless they are directly pointed out, but these same people will still have the feeling that the graphics are good and better then something they have seen before. I guess the last step is making something so real that one cannot tell that its CG, but something like that will come not in one leap and bound as say having a CG space battle may have been, but it will come from many smaller, yet major protocols developed for movies like ratatullie.
I think we can just agree to disagree here because I don't see how this is going to develop further. I have stated what I thought, given you academic sources, as opposed to internet blogs, and I don't really have much more to add as I personally am not an expert in the field. Talk to my about cell Biology and we can go day and night there :P
oh and I just want to add as well Pixar as far as I know is the only major Animation studio, with an entire division set aside for research. Disney, dreamworks etc do not nessarily have this. Pixar and disney are one in the same now so that eg might not count.