How do you translate the smell and taste of food to the big-screen?

No, they’re not reviving Smell-o-Vision, but this summer’s “Ratatouille” will try to make audiences experience the smell and taste of food along with the digitially animated characters on-screen.

Brad Bird, who wrote and directed the upcoming Pixar release, said he challenged his crew to convey smell and taste within the film, which is set in a Paris restaurant.

“We actually have some interesting notions there,” Bird said in an interview while editing the film at Pixar’s headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., near San Francisco. “In fact, at … a couple of points in the film, we actually have a character close his eyes and the background kind of goes dark around the character, and we have music and abstract imagery to kind of show what a certain taste is like. That was one of the challenges of the film.”

We have characters talking about food,” Bird said. “I think there has been an extraordinary amount of effort here to make the food look good, or if it’s supposed to be bad, to make it look bad. … There’s a certain amount of light [that] penetrates the surface of the food and hits things under the food that then glow back through the food.”

In order to do this, the crew had to sample a variety of gourment food in order to bring the smell and taste to life on the big-screen.

We had consultants who are gourmet cooks give an overview of how not only how food looks, which we studied the heck out of it, but also how are things plated and how is it set up in the kitchen,” Bird said. He added: “There was a lot of effort put into even how food looks when you’re preparing it. How do you get sauces to curl around when people are stirring it? All that stuff is [computer-generated].”

“Ratatouille” hits theaters in June.