Bowl movement

Noel Vera

David Bowers and Sam Fell's "Flushed Away" (2006) is surprisingly
charming, an unholy marriage between Aardman Animations (responsible
for Nick Park's "Wallace and Gromit" movies) and Dreamworks that
actually manages to stay afloat, despite the tidal pull of American
digital animation and all its dreary clichés.

It's hard to say why--there's plenty the matter with the picture.
You miss the handmade quality of Park's films (yes, he's started
using CGI, but only to supplement the stop-motion animation), the
vast tabletop models (the aerial shots of the estate with the
carnival rides spinning about in "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" were so
intricately detailed you wanted to stop and stare), the (most of
all) expressive plasticine forehead of Gromit (he's to silent dog
comedy what Chaplin was to silent film comedy--a sweet yet somehow
melancholy champion). You don't miss the tired storylines, the
action sequences that ape amusement park rides or the latest extreme
sports that seem standard-issue in most animated American films
nowadays--all that swinging from vines (in this case, electric cords
and pipes running liquid nitrogen (but what are liquid nitrogen
pipes doing in a sewer?)), the motorboats chased by hand mixers, the
parachuting and hang-gliding and water-skiing and whatnot (when
Parks did chases, they weren't mere coaster rides, but structural
frames on which to hang all kinds of sight gags). Strangely, the
baggage that does comes with the digital animation is not as
annoying as usual--maybe it helps that longtime Parks collaborator
Peter Lord both produced and cooked up the script, with the help of
Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais (both veterans who have written for
Tracy Ullman and Lenny Henry), with additional material by Tim
Sullivan (who has adopted both E. M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh to the
big screen).

Fairly overqualified talent to bring together and focus on what is
essentially a mouse-out-of-water story: Roddy St. James (Hugh
Jackman) is the lonely spoiled dandy of a pet rat (from Kensington,
yet!) who gets flushed down the toilet by a rude intruder rat named
Sid (Shane Richie); underground, he encounters a subterranean
version of London, complete with a carton-box Big Ben and a broad
sewer canal representing the river Thames (again, those wondrous
tabletop models--a shade less wondrous, being digital constructs).
He meets Kate Winslet (granted she's been afflicted with the less-
than-attractive car-grille smile Aardman glues on all its
characters, and denied the bountiful upholstery she carries around
with her in real life, but still…) playing Rita, a spunky (but what
else could she be?) female rat out to smuggle the Queen's ruby to
her impoverished, physically handicapped father (David Suchet).
Standing in their way is the villainous Toad (Ian McKellen, more fun
here than when wrapped in leather as Magneto, much more entertaining
than he was or could ever be in Ron Howard's soggy "The Da Vinci
Code"), his pair of slightly out-of-it henchmen Spike (Andrew
Serkis, apparently still suffering withdrawal pains from losing The
One Ring) and Whitey (the wonderful Bill Nighy, playing the rodent
equivalent of a twenty-five watt bulb screwed into a fifty-watt
lamp), and as the smooth and suave Le Frog, the (who else?) smooth,
suave Jean Reno.

It's not just your usual multiplex kiddie fare, stuffed full of pop
cultural references (although there's plenty of those here
(allusions to "Finding Nemo," James Bond, Superman, Spiderman, and
previous Aardman films abound)), non-sequiturs, fart jokes, enough
sentimentality to send your blood sugar index soaring; this is a
seriously silly movie, where the actors mostly have a light touch
with jokes and you can catch glimpses of wit--or at the very least
evidence of an odd sense of humor. You'd be hard put to find a
movie, for example, where someone will inform you point-blank that
the stomach ache you're both suffering is "the curry you had last
night," adding confidentially: "I've got a bum like a Japanese
flag." When Rita takes Roddy home it's to a disarmingly ramshackle
house, precariously balanced (a reference to Chaplin's "The Gold
Rush"?) and inhabited by about a hundred brothers and sisters, a
cockroach boarder reading a French translation of Kafka's "The
Metamorphosis" (think about it), and a grandmother convinced that
Roddy's really Tom Jones, here for a visit. It's difficult to
maintain an air of snooty condescension towards a picture where
people are so eager to laugh at their own Britishness: discussing
both the imminent World Cup halftime and upcoming end of their
underground London (inextricably linked, thanks to an evil plan by
the Toad), Rita (on their chances of saving the day) declares: "It's
impossible!" Roddy responds: "England's winning--anything's
possible."

Then there's the slugs. Whole choruses of them, shrieking in the
dark, sliding down slippery tunnels, peering into this or that
shadowy corner, singing everything from Bobby McFerrin's "Don't
Worry, Be Happy, to Bobby Vinton's "Mr. Lonely"--excellent voices,
at that--and flitting around in a cocktail drink umbrella. It's
almost enough to make you want to adopt them as pets--almost.

As is, "Flushed Away" is inventive enough and eccentric enough to
distinguish itself against the rest of competition--against, say,
Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick's "Over the Hedge" with their
vision of row after row of gleaming suburban garbage cans, just
begging to be raided; or John Lasseter's "Cars" with its parallel
universe inhabited by automobiles, and its trademark blend of syrupy
sentiment and storytelling savvy. It doesn't have the grandeur and
ambition of George Miller's "Happy Feet"--penguins, yes, but with a
serious messiah complex--and it's so far below the level on which
Studio Ghibli is operating ("Howl's Moving Castle," the yet
unreleased Earthsea film) the joke's not very funny. But it's
passable, a recognizably Aardman product; here's to hoping they'll
get back to Parks, and to using plasticine.

(First published in Businessworld, 03/02/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)