ANI-MOVIE, *Flushed Away

Aside from the fact the film was minus any hamster butlers as shown in certain previews, Aardman's first of only two fully-CGI animated movies wasn't the drowning disappointment most people thought it was. This was the last of three films Aardman did with DreamWorks before joining up with Sony, but instead of the studio's traditional stop motion animation as they did with Wallace And Gromit, Flushed Away was all done digitally which might seem like a stretch for them to take, but then even the Jim Henson Company got roped into doing a few direct-to-video bad 3D releases. It was chosen to go CGI because the majority of the animation takes place around water and would make it difficult to move around clay figures, so Aardman put aside their Gummy standards to give digital animation a shot. Upon first look, some might confuse this for being a Danger Mouse ripoff, but since Flushed Away was directed by animator David Bowers who worked for Cosgrove Hall, you'd be better off thinking of the film as an homage. Along with director Sam Fell, Aardman had a total of five screenwriters to write all of the "witty dialogue". The cast was stacked with Hugh Jackman in the lead role and finally singing, Ian McKellen playing the wannabe Bond villain, Kate Winslet as the inevitable love interest, Jean Reno as the standard French stereotype, plus Andy Serkis and Bill Nighy as a comical pair of henchmen.

Roddy is the pet rat of a rich family in London who leave home for vacation, and he gets literally flushed down the tubes by the intrusive Sid who takes over his pad. Roddy ends up in a rat metropolis within the sewers which is partially run by the criminal boss Toad who captures him and a female ship captain named Rita who he tried to gain passage with back up top. Rita and Roddy escape along with taking Toad's master cable to his apparatus which he planned to wipe out all the rats from the sewer, so Toad sends his cousin Le Frog and his team of French zipper ninjas to get it back. Rita eventually helps Roddy get back to his home, but after realizing that he was miserable being lonely in a such a big palatial estate and figuring out what Toad has planned for the other rats, Roddy gets flushed away again to save everyone.

Flushed Away doesn't have the most spectacular computer graphics in an animated film, however there is some particularly upstanding slapstick and rapid-fire dialogue that make it a comedic watch. It would have been better if Aardman had been able to pull off their usual claymation creations, but the 3D animation is acceptable even if it's not up to Pixar's level. A sample of something that definitely padded out the runtime longer than it needed to be is the singing slugs who show up to do a romantic ditty and demanding to be noticed, as if the slugs were the prototype for the Minions from Despicable Me that Illumination totally stole from. Your kids might just see this film as a fun sit to fill out an afternoon, but Anglophiles and animation fans should get a kick out of it.