Review of Flushed Away (2006) by Markb. — 12 Dec 2006

Following the box office disappointment of this animated feature (you don't have to be Jimmy the Greek to correctly bet that viewers young and old would rather watch dancing penguins than rats flushed down toilets) it was announced that Aardman Animation would not be working with DreamWorks Pictures again.

Here's one more example of a Hollywood breakup whose causes are so easy to explain that almost any average, casual moviegoer and Entertainment Weekly reader can temporarily claim amateur divorce-lawyer status.

Aardman's previous full-length features, Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, succeeded beautifully with abundant charm, dry British wit, attention to character that was almost as painstaking as their shot-by-shot work with hand-crafted plasticine figures, and GENERALIZED observation and parody of specific movie genres (the P.

O.W. escape movie, the horror film). DreamWorks, on the other hand, specializes in loud, often exhausting, frequently crass CGI jokefests that too often substitute for real humor or observation an endless fusillade of pop-culture references that serve no other purpose than to inform us that the writers watched the same TV and movies and listened to the same Top 40 radio that the rest of us did.

(Their good stuff--the Shreks--still comes off as a bit forced and overbearing; Madagascar and Shark Tale are well-nigh unwatchable, and their lone gem, this year's earlier Over the Hedge, is either an example of its makers reining in their worst, most excessive impulses and genuinely learning from Pixar and Chuck Jones or the ultimate illustration of the spaghetti-on-the-wall theory.

) When DreamWorks stays in the background and lets Aardman thematically and stylistically dominate, as happened with Chicken and Wallace, all is well and the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack can fly side by side in peace and friendship; when DreamWorks takes over too much of the editorial content, which I strongly suspect happened here, you get this thing.

Flushed Away, the story of a Roddy, a poor little rich rat who, when his owners go on holiday, inadvertently gets sucked into the sewers and discovers a whole community of one-liner-spouting creatures he never knew existed, works on the DreamWorks theory that no gag or background throwaway is too forced or unfunny to land on the cutting-room floor and adds a corollary of its own: when in doubt, slam the hero in his little tiny balls.

(This movie is in doubt a LOT.) I wasn't surprised to learn, while watching the end credits, that Flushed Away's five (!!) writers included two sitcom pros, Frasier's Christopher Lloyd and Joe Keenan--in fact, that goes a long way toward explaining why one of the film's villains, the crude, lazy bully Sid, has a personality so similar to Daphne's worthless brother on that show.

But then, even the stuff that works in Flushed Away is disappointingly derivative: the best gag, predicated on seeing something you think is something but is really something else, is a recycling of a convulsively funny sequence in Caddyshack, and even this movie's celebrated singing slugs call forth too many memories of the infinitely more charming singing mice in the original Babe.

Speaking of which, even Aardman's trademark character design (give everybody big, bulging eyes and stereotypically British buck teeth) works against them here: if you're going to make an animated film about VERMIN, for crying out loud, you'd better make them cuter than Pixie and Dixie combined! The final, surprise bit involving Sid really DOES work, and it's hard to completely dislike any film whose suspenseful climax is built from the urban legend involving toilet use during the Super Bowl and other big sporting events, but overall, Flushed Away's failure was set long ago when Aardman made its Faustian decision to eschew its traditional, Harryhausen-like approach and hop on the CGI expresss.

If they did it because, as some of their representatives have explained, water is too difficult to animate the old way, then let's hope Aardman's next project takes place in the Sahara Desert.

As Flushed Away proves, their movies work when they're completely TOUCHED by human hands.