Flushed Away at 20: Aardman’s CGI Experiment, and the Last DreamWorks Co-Production

DreamWorks Animation and Aardman Features had already made two films together by the time Flushed Away arrived in 2006. The first was Chicken Run in 2000. The second was Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005. Flushed Away was the third and final co-production between the two studios, and it is the odd one out in the set for one plain reason: it was the first Aardman project animated primarily in 3D CGI instead of claymation.

The switch was not a matter of taste. Water would have damaged plasticine models, and Flushed Away is a film built almost entirely around water. So the studio that had made its name with fingerprints in the clay went digital, and the result is a movie that looks like an Aardman film even when it no longer feels like one under the hand.

Trailer, via AnimatedMoviesC.

Roddy St. James and the Kensington Flat

The film opens above ground, in a large Kensington flat, where a pet rat named Roddy St. James lives a soft life. Hugh Jackman voices him. When Roddy’s owners leave on holiday, he takes advantage of being alone.

That night a sloppy sewer rat named Sid, voiced by Shane Richie, bursts out of the kitchen sink. Sid decides to stay and watch the 2006 FIFA World Cup final. Roddy imagines Sid taking over his life, demands that he leave, and gets refused. Sid starts treating Roddy as a butler. Roddy tries to trick him into thinking the apartment’s Jacuzzi-brand toilet is an actual Jacuzzi. Sid is sloppy but he knows about toilets. He pretends to be fooled, then pushes Roddy in and pulls the lever.

It is a clean joke and a good one. The tagline for the film is “Someone’s going down,” and the movie earns it in the first act without straining.

Ratropolis, the Jammy Dodger, and Rita Malone

Below London, Roddy finds Ratropolis, a sewer city built out of junk and shaped to resemble London. A pirate rat tells him to look for Rita Malone, an enterprising scavenger who works the drains in her boat, the Jammy Dodger, and who might be able to send him home. Kate Winslet voices Rita.

Rats named Spike and Whitey abduct the pair and bring them before their boss, the Toad, voiced by Ian McKellen. Rita had stolen back a ruby that her father scavenged. The Toad hates rodents to the point of obsession, and he plans to freeze Roddy and Rita with liquid nitrogen after Roddy accidentally destroys part of his British porcelain memorabilia. The two escape.

Rita takes the ruby and a unique electric master cable needed to control Ratropolis’ sewer floodgates. Roddy works out that the ruby is a glass replica and breaks it easily, which enrages Rita into attacking him. He offers her a real ruby from his owner’s jewelry box if she takes him back to Kensington. She agrees. They stop to visit her family first.

The Cast Around Jackman and Winslet

The voice cast is deeper than the two leads. Ian McKellen plays the Toad as a creature of pure grievance. Jean Reno is Le Frog. Bill Nighy is Whitey and Andy Serkis is Spike, the two thugs. Kathy Burke, David Suchet and Miriam Margolyes voice Rita’s Mum, Dad and Grandma. Rachel Rawlinson is Tabitha and Susan Duerden is Mother.

That is a lot of names for a film that runs 85 minutes. The screenwriting credits are just as crowded: Joe Keenan, Sam Fell, Dick Clement, William Davies, Peter Lord, Christopher Lloyd, Ian La Frenais and Lise Mayer. Wikipedia’s entry lists Clement, La Frenais, Lloyd, Keenan and Davies. Either way, this is a script assembled by committee, and it shows in the best way and the worst way.

A Story Conceived While Making Chicken Run

The origin of Flushed Away is worth knowing because it explains what the film is. Director Sam Fell conceived the idea of rats falling in love in the sewers while working on Chicken Run. In 2001 he developed a story and pitched it to DreamWorks. The project was announced in July 2002, with Clement and La Frenais contracted to write the script under the working title Ratropolis. Bowers joined Fell as co-director in 2003.

That timeline matters. This is not a film that started as a sewer movie. It started as a romance between two rats and grew a city, a villain, a floodgate plot and a World Cup gag around itself. The seams are visible if you look.

The table is the whole argument about this movie in four rows. Flushed Away is the one where the tools changed.

What the CGI Switch Costs

Aardman’s claymation has a texture that reads as handmade, and that texture is not decoration. It is the reason a plasticine chicken or a plasticine dog feels like a character rather than a rendering. Flushed Away gives that up. What it gains is water, and water is the point of the film. The sewers, the floodgates, the boat on the drains, the liquid nitrogen — none of it would work in clay without wrecking the models.

So the trade is real and it is honest. The film looks polished. It moves well. It also looks like a lot of other animated films from 2006, which is the thing an Aardman movie had never done before.

What holds up is the writing. The Toad’s porcelain collection is a good running target. Roddy’s class anxiety about Sid is a good engine for the first act. Rita is the best character in the film because she is the only one with a job, a boat, a family and a grudge, and Winslet plays her without softening her.

What does not hold up is the middle. Once Roddy and Rita are on the Jammy Dodger and the floodgate plot takes over, the film starts moving pieces instead of telling jokes. The World Cup setup in the first act is sharper than anything that follows it.

Flushed Away at the Tokyo International Film Festival

Flushed Away premiered on 22 October 2006 at the Tokyo International Film Festival, then went wide in the United States through Paramount Pictures on 3 November 2006. It runs 85 minutes across adventure, animation, comedy and family. It scored 7.4 out of 10, with a Metacritic mark of 74 out of 100.

That score is about right, and the reason is that Flushed Away is two films. One is a sharp, funny, well-cast sewer comedy with a great first act and a villain worth fearing. The other is a competent CGI adventure that could have come from any studio in 2006. The first film is better than the score. The second film is worse. They average out.

The part worth remembering is the decision itself. Aardman went digital because water would have ruined the clay, made one film that way, and then never did it again with DreamWorks. Flushed Away is the record of that experiment: a good movie, a strange artifact, and the last time these two studios worked together.

2006 animated film · Aardman · DreamWorks Animation · Flushed Away · Hugh Jackman · Kate Winslet