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Good point on assessing the difference between risk and contradiction.

I think Josh's question is regarding the *commercial* risk of the *idea*, and not the actual character.  Personally, I found the idea of the film to be *potentially* risky commercially (rats in the kitchen), but any true inherent risk, challenge, or discomfort was swiftly sanitized by Pixar and Disney, or rather writer-director Brad Bird.

Making your Rat character have big cartoon eyes, with warm, clean-looking fur, and giving him sophisticated talk about food and wine is really not risky at all.  No one is going to be disturbed by that.  And actually, this is one of the (many) reasons I found the film to be unsatisfying.  But it's also probably why it was a big success with large crowds.  Like all Pixar, kid-friendly to the extreme.  Originally this was not a bad thing, but wearing thin as the films become more formulaic.

Sorry, just my take.  One of my lesser favorite Pixar movies (along with Bird's other film, "The Incredibles", and more recently "Wall-E", "Cars", and "Up")

I don't know why, but in the first minute, I thought Bob was going to start talking about Kelsey Grammer's show Gary the Rat.