Flushed Away Review
by [email protected] (sdo230 AT gmail DOT com)November 7th, 2006
Flushed Away
reviewed by Sam Osborn
Director: David Bowers, Sam Fell
Screenplay: Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Christopher Lloyd, Joe Keenan, Will Davies
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellan, Bill Nighy MPAA Classification: PG (crude humor, some language)
It seems as though Dreamworks Animation and Aardman Studios have called the plumber to fish this humble dud from the sewers. It was supposedly put there in the first place, upsized by the delicious clay morsel, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit, and put on hold indefinitely. But since the British clay detectives made for box office success last Halloween, the likes of Flushed Away were sucked back up to ground level for a quick and hearty cash-in. The results have worked, it seems; with a hefty box office pull raked in this opening weekend. But as much as the audiences will hope for another British gem of novelty and quirk, they'll be in for something far, far more diluted.
It's the tale of Roddy (Hugh Jackman), a groomed and sophisticated mouse living comfortably in a London home as a pet. His friends are Barbies and GI Joes and his owners have left him to them for a week away on vacation. It's shaping up to be a raucous week with his plastic housemates until his toilet gurgles up Sid (Shane Richie), a disgusting sewer rat who tricks Roddy into being flushed away. Down the pipe and away from a strangely bright and sunny London on ground level, Roddy is thrown into a bizarre mock-up of London beneath ground, inhabited entirely by mice. There he meets Rita (Kate Winslet), a sassy treasure hunter on the run from Toad (Ian McKellan) and his nasty cohorts, who secretly plan to annihilate the underground mouse population. Swept up in adventure, Roddy clumsily makes his way aboard Rita's boat, the Jammy Dodger, and speeds away to save the sewer from its diabolical, wart-ridden foe.
All this hurtles at us with surprising velocity. Despite clocking in at a full 86 minutes, Flushed Away seems always to be in vicious rush. It's as though Directors David Bowers and Sam Fell are playing a game of hopscotch on a pool of lily pads with their film. They're aware their story's built on a creaky foundation of trodden clichés (despite the deceivingly quirky premise) and have a plan to rush through it all before someone has the gall to notice. But when the film occasionally stops to breathe and whet the raucous tale with a taste of story, the fun all comes to screeching halt.
Fun, perhaps, is the wrong word for the experience, though, because Flushed Away's humor is by no means genuine. Where Wallace and Gromit's humor was mined from the charm of its characters and the quirk of its story, Flushed Away steals laughs from unexpected sound bytes and witty inside jokes with the adults. As a consolation, however, I'll admit to loving the chorus of singing slugs. For all my complaining, the slugs really were wonderful.
The animation style is a CGI mimic of Aardman's claymation technique used in Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run. The absurdity is all there, with the ridiculous wide mouths that contract and explode horizontally like an anime character with a speech impediment; but the novelty of the style isn't. When animators work with stop-motion animation (Wallace and Gromit, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Corpse Bride), each frame takes an absurd amount of time and labor. And because each frame takes so long, each frame is loaded with an amazing amount quirk and style. CGI animation (Cars, Madagascar, Over the Hedge), although no small chore, is a world away from the time-gobbling measures of stop-motion. The difference here is easily noticeable, as Flushed Away's mimic of claymation comes off more like a quick-fix solution to the years required to produce a stop-motion feature.
And I suppose that's the feeling we get from Flushed Away in its entirety. The project seems hacked together; shoddy and boring in all its rough and tumble. Calling it a cash-in may be caddy and overstated, but Flushed Away fails even at being a Wallace and Gromit copycat. Rating: 1.5 out of 4
Sam Osborn
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
