Day 16 - Flushed Away (2006)

So, here's my big confession of the day: I have a bit of a phobia about stop-motion animation. I thought it was creepy even before it was used to even creepier effect to permanently traumatise my younger self in the climactic scenes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. To this day, if a film looks as though it might have been made using this technique I can never entirely settle to watching it just in case something unexpectedly nasty happens.

I'm mostly over it now, though, thanks to the enduringly goodhearted work of Aardman Animations. It took a lot of years, but I was gradually able to work my way through the Creature Comforts segments up to Wallace and Gromit and eventually on to Chicken Run. Eventually, I regained my confidence to the point where I'm now able to watch the (non-Aardman-produced) Coraline and only want to run screaming from the room during the really scary bits.

Flushed Away, of course, isn't claymation, although it has been skilfully designed to look that way - plasticene models tend not to work when telling a story with strong aquatic elements. It retains the Aardman house style, however, which will be familiar to anybody who's ever seen any of the Wallace and Gromit shorts. It's not one I've ever found particularly aesthetically appealing, but Aardman's trademark warmth and humour means I always enjoy their work even if I don't always actively seek it out.

The film tells the story of Roddy St. James (Hugh Jackman), a pampered pet rat who lives in  wealthy Kensington in a literal gilded cage. When a broken drain brings slobbish sewer rat Sid (Shane Richie) abruptly into his life, chaos soon ensues as he finds himself flushed down the toilet and into a mysterious parallel London that exists beneath the city streets. Whilst there, he encounters treasure hunter Rita (Kate Winslet) and wealthy gangster the Toad (Ian McKellen), and inadvertently uncovers a plot that could endanger the entire lower city.

The good

I've added Flushed Away to my list of films not because it wasn't well reviewed - it was - but because I believe that its IMDB user rating of 6.1 is an absolute tragedy. Without a doubt, this is one of the most hectically playful movies I have ever seen, making Airplane look like Solaris by comparison. Its endless visual invention remained unparalleled until the advent of this year's Lego Movie, and the lack of heavy moralising means it continues to be much easier to digest.

Aardman can attract big-name vocal talent these days, and it shows. However, these aren't star turns in the model of Robin Williams' Genie - I would have been hard-pressed to identify any individual voices. What we get instead, then, is everybody bringing their A-games to an effervescent script written by old hands Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

The story itself is serviceable enough, but never interferes with the nonstop gags, which are designed to appeal to as wide a variety of audiences as possible. There's a neverending stream of pop culture references but they slide down easily, appearing on advertising hoardings or as second-long throwaways. So what if one misses the mark? Blink and you'll have missed several more.

The bad

Nothing here that doesn't fall into the category of minor niggles, really; this is a stunningly, gloriously good film whose chief misstep, I believe, lay in being released less than a year before Pixar's Ratatouille. Make no mistake, Flushed Away is by far the better talking rat movie, but the Disney/Pixar colossus casts both a long shadow and a broad one, and nobody ever remembers the name of the guy who came second. A few years previously, Antz suffered a similar fate at the hands of the anodyne, witless A Bug's Life.

That said, I do get vaguely irritated by that old chestnut whereby a film's entire plot basically consists of a sassy female redeeming a gormless male. It seems to have been the plot of approximately fifty percent of both Hollywood Blockbusters and TV commercials for at least the past decade now. Nobody's suggesting that we should go back to the old days of damsels in distress, but surely there has to be some sort of halfway point where, I don't know, competent individuals of both genders work together to defeat whatever threat the scriptwriters see fit to throw at them?

Oh, and there's the fat issue. Flushed Away contains three chubby characters - The Toad (evil), Rita's father (incompetent) and Sid (a little from column A, a little from column B). I doubt this was high on anybody's actual checklist either as something to do or not to do, but every time a mainstream family film does something like this it functions as a few extra drops in the ocean of anti-fat prejudice.

The verdict

If you haven't seen this one, you probably ought to. Even if animation isn't your thing, this is arguably the single funniest example of the genre and possibly one of the best.