A series of ifs, buts, exclamations and enquiries pertaining to the latest animated feature... What? Another animated feature? But haven’t I seen 765,664 of these this year already? But wait. This one is from Aardman Studios so, in common with debilitating bone disease, it has to be better than Barnyard, right?
Well, it does seem to breeze along even if it’s full of visual and actual non-sequitors. Hugh Jackman voices a pampered pet rodent who gets flushed down into the bowels of London where he finds a what-if version of the city populated by rats and toads. There he meets a feisty girl vermin (Kate Winslet) with red hair, millions of siblings and – wouldn’t-you-know-it? – an Irish mother. She’s just cheated the evil toad overlord of the sewer (Ian McKellen) out of a ruby but only to support her family. And so on. But isn’t the final subplot requiring Jackman and Winslet to save the world just a bit tacked on? Why does ‘Bohemian Like You’ feature in every other scene? Is there a new law or something? And if everything hinges around an England vs Germany World Cup Final, shouldn’t this film have been released back in June?
To be fair, there are flashes of invention – rats ride around on rubber ducks using Bratz guitars for paddles, robot arms take central place – but they’re far closer to the run-of-the-mill novelty of Chicken Run than the ingenious gizmos and doodads of The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. Like that film, Flushed Away plays up its Englishness, but sadly never feels either quaint or eccentric. It hardly needs to be said that the CG animation looks fine and dandy... but godammit I wanted claymation. Can’t anyone with a mobile phone and plenty of time on their hands cook up digital cartoons in this day and age?
Oh well. At least Hugh Jackman makes for an amiable lead. Like Nathan Lane, he funnels all of his experience from musical theatre into his voice work. Now if only I liked musical theatre...