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Flushed Away
An actual story! With genuine characters! In a kid's cartoon? Say it ain't so! Watching Flushed Away makes it obvious just how low our standards have fallen when it comes to cartoon animal movies. Sure, Over the Hedge and Open Season and all of the other 15 or so CG kiddie 'toons from this year had a few laughs, but leave it to Aardman—the British animation studio behind Wallace & Gromit—to show us how it's really done.
Aristocratic pet rat Roddy (Hugh Jackman) has a lot of fun in a big house messing around with action figures that, to him, are literally larger than life. But when an obnoxious sewer rat (Shane Richie) flushes him down the toilet, he discovers an entire world in the pipes beneath London and gets caught up in an adventure involving the renegade pirate Rita (Kate Winslet) and an evil, monarchist frog (Ian McKellen) who used to be Prince Charles' pet.
Eschewing their usual clay animation, Aardman use CG this time, as running water doesn't translate too well to stop-motion. It looks like they've tried to adapt the specific visuals of stop-frame to the medium as well, which makes it feel familiar, if a bit quaint. The movie isn't immune from the unfortunate modern tendency to incorporate pop songs (Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" is unwelcome amid vastly superior original numbers), but it isn't ruined by them either.
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