Flushed Away - 7.6/10
The third – and to date, last – Aardman production in the
Dreamworks library, Flushed Away is decidedly more mainstream than its two
predecessors, Chicken Run and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Not
that mainstream is in and of itself a bad thing, but there’s little here aside
from the distinctive art style to indicate that it’s an Aardman production at
all.
To start with, they opted for CGI instead of stop-motion,
and while I can understand the decision from a technical standpoint (there’s a lot of water, which is quite difficult
to pull off in stop-motion), it comes at the cost of sacrificing some of that
charm I talked about before. Additionally, the writing – while still pretty
tight – didn’t really feel like Aardman to me. There weren’t nearly as many
clever puns or visual gags as Wallace and Gromit, or even Chicken
Run, and so it loses something that made those films unique.
What we do have is
a lot of slapstick, and it’s well-executed for the most part and I don’t think
they overdid it. Also, as to be expected of a film set mostly in a sewer, there
are a lot of poop and fart jokes, mostly to the good if you like that sort of
thing. One of my favorite running gags was having ambience and background music
be something characters were actually doing. Sometimes it was related to what
was going on, sometimes it was just a random incidental extra who happened to
be playing the accordion at just the right moment. This was always handled with
a reveal a few seconds in, and since we’re conditioned to expect background
ambience in films, it gets us every time. And of course is another animal
mini-civilization like in Antz, Shark Tale and The
Great Mouse Detective. The standard smaller version of London made of
knick-knacks and garbage is present, and we do get a few good visual jokes out
of it.
There was a moment when I groaned aloud because they went
with the contrived overheard misunderstanding plot device, but it was actually
resolved fairly quickly so I’d say they saved it. Barely. Truly, it’s just your
basic voyage and return story. Roddy is ripped out of his comfortable life as a
pet rat in the royal district and into the crazy, fast-paced world of the
sewer. The plot revolves around his attempts to get home, the deal he makes with
a ship captain to get him there, and the villain whose plans they inadvertently
hinder.
When I said they’d gone mainstream, I meant it. Aardman
doesn’t do anything half-assed, and when they go mainstream they pull out all
the stops. There were big name Hollywood actors (mostly solid performances but
nothing outstanding with one exception), popular contemporary music, and they
even closed with the ubiquitous dance party ending that Dreamworks still hadn’t
gotten tired of at that point.
There was, as I mentioned, one performance that by far
outshone the others. The villain of the film is an upper class toad turned mob
boss who knows he is above these filthy sewer rats and isn’t afraid to say so.
He is played by Sir Ian McKellan delivering the hammiest performance of his
career, and it’s every bit as glorious as that implies. Every single second his
is on screen is absolute gold and he was clearly having as much fun doing it as
we are watching it. This movie could be half an hour longer and I wouldn’t mind
at all if it meant we could see more of his character.
The ending was predictable but still nice, and even with the
dance party ending, the music is at least catchy and the visuals are still
entertaining. I liked it.
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