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Flushed Away
4WFR: Rats, Toad... no Mole!
First film of 2007!
Flushed Away is the latest from Aardman (Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit) and Dreamworks PDI (Shrek, Madagascar). It's CGI rather than claymation, but what remained to be seen was whether the American money from Dreamworks would ruin Aardman's great run at creating fun stories.
Well, on the whole, it worked. There are plenty of laugh out loud moments and the ride from start to finish is pretty well paced, and things are kept reasonably simple plot and character wise, which is perfectly fine for a film aimed at small children. Of course, because it's aimed at small children, the humour is mostly limited to the slapstick violence and football-in-the-groin jokes, but there's a few moments of film/tv parody that are worth a chuckle.
The plot: Rich pet rat Roddy St James (Hugh Jackman) is forcibly flushed down to the sewers where he very quickly gets in the middle of a feud between scavenger/sailor rat Rita (Kate Winslet) and the nefarious and flamboyant villain Toad (Sir Ian McKellen, in hilariously fine form). As Roddy tries to get back home, he learns the lessons of friendship and family (yeah, yeah, cliche and typical but it is a kids film!) and eventually helps Rita to defeat the Toad's evil plot to wipe out all rats from the sewer.
Some great side roles are also present - Le Frog (Jean Reno), Spike (Andy Serkis) and Whitey (Bill Nighy) add to the humour as the Toad's bungling henchmen, with a few good rat/frog/french jokes thrown in there too.
The character design is typical Aardman - close eyes, overbites, and the CG is pretty good, although everything is quite bright and shiny - claymation gives a lot of nice shadows, which tend to be overlooked in CG due to the huge amount of render time required for decent lighting effects. The action sequences certainly would have been incredibly difficult to do in claymation, so they work reasonably well in CG.
And most importantly, the story and writing is still quite Aardman-like (compare it with Chicken Run) so whatever influence Dreamworks had, it wasn't significant.
This film isn't hugely groundbreaking, but they appear to have beat Pixar to the punch with the 'Rat' film (Pixar's Rattatouille comes out later this year) although Dreamworks haven't done a Cars one yet :)
8/10
EDIT: I just realised I forgot to mention the cutesy singing slugs. There were cutesy singing slugs. A device like that definitely has the potential to ruin a film such as this, but luckily they didn't.
Flushed Away
4WFR: Rats, Toad... no Mole!
First film of 2007!
Flushed Away is the latest from Aardman (Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit) and Dreamworks PDI (Shrek, Madagascar). It's CGI rather than claymation, but what remained to be seen was whether the American money from Dreamworks would ruin Aardman's great run at creating fun stories.
Well, on the whole, it worked. There are plenty of laugh out loud moments and the ride from start to finish is pretty well paced, and things are kept reasonably simple plot and character wise, which is perfectly fine for a film aimed at small children. Of course, because it's aimed at small children, the humour is mostly limited to the slapstick violence and football-in-the-groin jokes, but there's a few moments of film/tv parody that are worth a chuckle.
The plot: Rich pet rat Roddy St James (Hugh Jackman) is forcibly flushed down to the sewers where he very quickly gets in the middle of a feud between scavenger/sailor rat Rita (Kate Winslet) and the nefarious and flamboyant villain Toad (Sir Ian McKellen, in hilariously fine form). As Roddy tries to get back home, he learns the lessons of friendship and family (yeah, yeah, cliche and typical but it is a kids film!) and eventually helps Rita to defeat the Toad's evil plot to wipe out all rats from the sewer.
Some great side roles are also present - Le Frog (Jean Reno), Spike (Andy Serkis) and Whitey (Bill Nighy) add to the humour as the Toad's bungling henchmen, with a few good rat/frog/french jokes thrown in there too.
The character design is typical Aardman - close eyes, overbites, and the CG is pretty good, although everything is quite bright and shiny - claymation gives a lot of nice shadows, which tend to be overlooked in CG due to the huge amount of render time required for decent lighting effects. The action sequences certainly would have been incredibly difficult to do in claymation, so they work reasonably well in CG.
And most importantly, the story and writing is still quite Aardman-like (compare it with Chicken Run) so whatever influence Dreamworks had, it wasn't significant.
This film isn't hugely groundbreaking, but they appear to have beat Pixar to the punch with the 'Rat' film (Pixar's Rattatouille comes out later this year) although Dreamworks haven't done a Cars one yet :)
8/10
EDIT: I just realised I forgot to mention the cutesy singing slugs. There were cutesy singing slugs. A device like that definitely has the potential to ruin a film such as this, but luckily they didn't.