The only remotely favorable depiction of rats I can think of was in Chicken Run. A more realistic portrayal was given in Lady and the Tramp.
I caught a field mouse once when I was walking through the countryside in Vermont. He was a cute little guy; he actually darted in front of me and then tried to hide in the space between the heel and sole of my left hiking boot. I picked him up gently and let him go after a minute or so.
The neighborhood I live in in Moscow is infested with rats. I hate the friggin’ things! ** YEECCH!!!**
Difference between rats and mice: one is a filthy beast which reeks of urine and often cannibalizes its young. The other is just a rat. But rat’s omnivory is more on the “meat” side, and we find that gross (even though a rat’s diet is very similar to our own).
Feeder mice and fancy mice aren’t the same thing. It’s the difference between a Lab and a Nureongi. There is no incentive to keep the feeder line healthy, they just need to live long enough to reach a certain size. I don’t know if this implies mental traits (docility etc.), but I wouldn’t be surprised if pet mice are better at that.
I used to keep pet mice when I was a kid; thought them cute, but not very characterful. I know, or know of, a couple of adult pet-mice owners-and-enthusiasts nowadays – there are a few around, and they seem to find their rodents as lovable and loving, as is usual with “pet people” and their charges.
I gather that in that “fancy”, the correct term for baby mice, is “pups” – something which would never have occurred to me.
I gather that many are of the opinion that this character in TWITW is not a true rat, but a European Water Vole (Arvicola amphibius) – a semi-aquatic rodent with some superficial resemblance to a rat; but overall, striking folk as cuter and less threatening. In the UK, the water vole is colloquially called the “water rat” – which IIRC is how the author refers to Ratty throughout the book.
With Mole as a co-hero, I suppose referring frequently to the doings of “the mole and the vole”, would have come across clunkily: maybe that’s why Grahame went with “rat”.
There was Ratatouille, of course, which had a rat as a main character. And Mrs Frisby and the rats of NIMH.
It’s actually much harder to come up with examples of evil mice. There was a white mouse in Garry Kilworth’s House of Tribes who was definitely evil, but that’s the only example I can think of. Even then, the main villains were a rat and an owl called Merciful.
You know, I’ve got a fan theory that Ratatouille and Secret of NIMH take place in the same universe - Remy’s family is descended from rats who escaped a French version of the NIMH project.
I thought Jerry was cute until I saw a cartoon where Jerry was crashing a very hoity-toity party. Tom was trying to keep him out of the hors d’voeuvres and the usual high jinks began. There was Jerry sitting on a roasted chicken. Now Jerry is swimming in the punch bowl. Finally we see Jerry sitting on a train of a fancy party dress and the horrified lady screams when she sees him.
After watching that, I never thought Jerry was cute again. Can you imagine going to a party and finding a mouse in the punch bowl? ::shudder::
There’s a brief scene in last summer’s animated film Epic where the heroine (a human who’s been magically shrunk down to miniature size) is almost killed by a mouse because she’s naive enough to see the mouse as cute and fuzzy and adorable instead of a vicious predator of bug-sized creatures such as herself. The mouse isn’t exactly evil, though, just an animal looking for a meal.
As **DrFidelius **says, a mouse’s reaction to getting cornered is to have a panic attack. A cornered rat OTOH will bite the cat’s eyes out. Back when rat-baiting was a thing (note the “i” there, pervs !) ratter terriers would often come out of the ring badly mangled.
But rat’s omnivory is more on the “meat” side, and we find that gross (even though a rat’s diet is very similar to our own).