Souris City

The fact that I could be entertained by another one of these animated talking animal movies is a miracle. Is this number 1000 over the past 2 years? I just love English sarcasm, wit, dryness that strikes a chord in these old bones. The great news, nobody was in drag.

During the movie, there are inside English jokes that Americans may not understand such as "England loses on penalty kicks" which is a modern football tradition in the UK and the English love of knick knacks. The singing slugs don't do it for me but the kids liked them.

I highly recommend this movie even if you are sick of computer animated talking animals.

Wallace and Gromit are critics darlings. Chicken Run had great reviews as well. I liked all those animated films somewhat, but I never understood their appeal to the critics. To me they were just so-so. This film has not done as well with the critics. It retains somewhat the look of the aforementioned claymation that Aardman is so famous for, but as most people reading this are probably well aware, it is strictly computer animated fare. I truly enjoyed it more than the other films by the talented animators at Aardman. Not a lot more. I much preferred the Shrek films and The Incredibles for recent animated greats. But you could do a lot worse than spending 90 minutes with your kids in a theater watching Flushed Away. ( The film across the hall at my multiplex comes to mind as I really did not want to go watch Tim Allen in a Santa suit for a third time.) The slugs (or perhaps they were leeches) were my favorite characters in the film. I found myself laughing a lot at their antics, sound effects and musical talent. I had fun. Nothing great but a good deal of fun.

Flushed Away is the perfect marriage between the American Dreamworks and their crass sense of humor and the British Aardman and their dry sense of humor. Beside the obvious jokes about the sewer there's much to enjoy for the more sophisticated viewer. Like a cockroach reading FranzKafka's The Metamorphosis. The voice-cast is spot on: Ian McKellen as the evil genius The Toad is pure delight, Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman are clearly having a blast giving their voices to rats Rita and Roddy. But the cream of the crop are the singing and screaming snails. When they sing at the top of their lungs Proud Mary you laugh so hard you have to check your underpants to see if you haven't had a little accident.

Like a lot of film reviewers, I had a lot of reservations about this film when I first saw the trailer. At first I thought it was going to be just another hastily made CGI cartoon about edgy cartoon animals, filled with top 40 or dance songs and full of topical jokes. The fact that as I waited for the movie to start, half the trailers were for more CGI cartoons about edgy cartoon animals and the other half was for films about trash talking fairy tale characters.

Thankfully this movie was a blessed reprieve from all of that. In Flushed Away, Aardman studios has made yet another family classic that will still be as entertaining ten years from now as it is today. Granted, it's loaded with a lot of pop songs and oldies, but most of them are sung by a chorus of slugs (which makes for one of the best running gags I've seen in a while).

The story actually felt pretty fresh for a family movie, or any movie for that matter. While it's by no means unpredictable, it doesn't feel too much like it's treading over the same ground most family films seem to go over these days. The jokes were surprisingly clever too. While there's the usual slapstick humor, there's also plenty of highbrow jokes thrown in the mix. (How often do you find references to Kafka in an animated feature, after all?) What I liked best about this movie was that Aardman stayed true to its roots of making stop-motion films. My initial worry was that they had sold out and were going to just make CGI films from here on out like everybody else, but when you watch this film, you'll see that they do as much as possible to maintain the look of their other animated films like Chiken Run and Wallace & Gromit. Overall this is a great selection to take your family to see, and worth seeing even if you're a grown up too.

I saw Flushed Away at a press screening in Berlin where it was shown in English to an overwhelmingly German audience. Leaving aside the clichés (Germans DO have a sense of humour - it's just different, okay?!), coming as yet another in a long line of CGI films and with (let's be honest here) a less than gripping concept, Flushed Away had only a certain amount of goodwill from this professional crowd. So when an audience like this, yours truly included, laughs aloud and often then there's something special up on the screen!

The humour is overwhelmingly English and there is none of the morality messaging that makes family films from certain other studios such a cringe-inducing experience. The characters are very well drawn (literally as well as figuratively) and the voice casting is universally excellent. The standard of animation is fantastic but you never once get the sense that anyone is showing off what they can do. This is a story- and character-driven film, with the technology there to serve. Anyone writing it off because it is not claymation is doing themselves a great disservice.

Lovers of Wallace & Gromit and Aardman's work in general will have a ball spotting the oh so many references. The level of detail is amazing and it's going to take many viewings and many hours with the DVD on pause to spot them all. There are the bunnies from Curse of the Wererabbit, for example. I spotted the Lion King on the little girl's windowsill, and so on. And on.

When a film credits several writers, plus comedy consultants, it's usually a sign that the script has gone horribly and tragically wrong. Maybe it did, to begin with, and the start is just a tad slow, but it soon picks up speed and the jokes, verbal and visual, just keep coming.

Like the best family films, Flushed Away appeals to audiences of all ages, but the very young might find it a bit long. Not that it lags at any time, merely that the wee tots might get fidgety, you understand.

The cast do a great job and I'm not going to single out anyone for special mention. The performances are spot on and everyone is obviously having a tongue in cheek good time. For professional reasons, I get to watch some 300 or more films a year. Flushed Away belongs to the very, very few that I wanted to see again right after it had finished. And before you ask, no, I am not being paid, induced or threatened at gunpoint to write this. I had a cracking good time, as did my girlfriend (Julia, German, with sense of humour) and you will too.