'Flushed Away' is one of those few Hollywood synergies that really works.
This marriage between Britain’s indispensable Aardman Features and America’s DreamWorks SKG brings out the best in both organizations.
The last time anything worked this well in the animation field was the fortuitous union of Disney and Pixar in the ‘Toy Story’ series.
Aardman was responsible for the Oscar winning ‘Wallace and Gromit’ series, ‘The Curse of the Were-Rabbit’ and ‘Chicken Run,’ while DreamWorks has an enviable record as a producer of feature films.
Visually, ‘Flushed Away’ takes full advantage of the Aardman's droll British sense of humor combining it with the flash and dash of Yankee sensibilities.
The union is even more felicitous on the technical front.
The characters are the three-dimensional, plasticine creatures we are familiar with. The hair is stringy, the eyes - globes set under beetle brows and wildly expressive eyebrows.
But instead of stop-motion, that is moving tiny creatures on miniature sets, the images have been fed into computers and electronically manipulated. The software is called Bun-Vac 6000 and was first used in ‘The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.’ It reproduces the imperfections found in clay stop motion including dropped frames and thumbprints, and combines it with the smooth movement of state of the art CGI.
Both techniques have their own visual comic strengths and combust into something even better.
The pace is so frantic and there is so much going on in this movie that you either have to see it again to wait for the DVD to get all the jokes.
Roddy St James (Hugh Jackman) is the pampered pet mouse of a well to do London family.
When they go off on holiday, a filthy sewer rat named Sid (Shane Richie) pops up out of the goop in the sink and proceeds to take over Roddy’s entitled life.
Roddy tries to fool Sid into thinking the toilet is a whirlpool bath. It doesn’t work, as Sid pushes Roddy into the commode. After a wild ride in the sewers, Roddy comes out in a wondrous land beneath the streets of London – a sort of alternate version composed of junk and discarded items and peopled by rats, mice, cats, frogs and slugs.
Roddy meets Rita - Kate Winslet in full insouciant British bird mode. The fiery, redheaded Rita is captain of her own boat, the Jammy Dodger, which has a tap handle for ship’s wheel, tennis balls for bumpers and a gas can for a cabin. He also runs afoul of the evil Toad (Sir Ian McKellen) and his henchrats, the fast-talking Spike (Andy Serkis) and the loutish Whitey (Bill Nighy).
Toad plots the death of all rodents by having them “flushed away” during the break in a World Cup football broadcast.
When things don’t go Toad’s way, he summons his cousin Le Frog (an archly comic Jan Reno), a French soldier of fortune, who immediately sets out to thwart Rita and Roddy – immediately, that is, after a very French five-hour dinner.
There is a Greek chorus of colorful slugs who break into song at the flush of a toilet and darn near run off with the show.
My companion for the show was an oh-so-hip teen who wasn’t really sure she wanted to go to an animated film. When she left, she was thinking about coming back with all her friends.
I suspect Flushed Away works for all ages. Kids will enjoy the bright, comic characters and non-stop action while parents will see an amusing fantasy – a parable on the importance of friendship, family and love in a contemporary world.
It’s been a good year for animated films of all sorts. ‘Flushed Away,’ a true family film, is one of the best.
Opens wide USA, November 3. Rated PG for crude humor and some language.
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