Flushed Away with Hugh Jackman & Kate Winslet

Sushi Without the Fish

There was something especially wonderful about Aardman Animations and their stop-action clay animation movies like Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit movies and shorts, produced by Nick Park.

The stories were inventive and affecting and the characters were handmade; you could literally see the artist’s fingerprints in the clay.

The problem with Flushed Away, the latest CGI release from Aardman and Dreamworks may be that there are too many fingerprints on it. There are four credited story writers and six screenplay writers, none of them Nick Park.

The movie ends up being a kind of California Roll; you know, sushi without the fish.

There’s the makings a good movie here. The cast is dynamite. The storyline is out or the ordinary and the animations are shiny as a newly-minted penny. It's just missing a soul; or maybe just Nick Park.

Flushed Away is about the longstanding enmity between the class amphibia and the order rodentia, which plays out in the sewers beneath London.

Roddy (Hugh Jackman) is a lonely if pampered pet mouse in a posh Kensington apartment who finds himself flushed into a shadow-London with bustling streets, Big Ben, a mini-Thames, even the London Bridge.

There he falls in with lovely Rita (Kate Winslet), a riverboat captain from a family of scavengers who is on a collision coarse with The Toad (Ian McKellen), a grandiose crime kingpin with a scheme for ridding the sewers of mice.

Roddy is horribly clumsy physically and socially in this lower world, but he’s quite taken with Rita and her extended family of seemingly hundreds of mice. Roddy and Rita openly disdain one another, but we no where that relationship is headed. They throw in together to stop The Toad from fully flushing London's sewers.

McKellen plays The Toad the way Sidney Greenstreet might have; big and broad. McKellen's way over the top and having fun. He's joined by Da Vinci Code co-star Jean Reno, who plays The Toad's French cousin Le Frog. A Frog playing a frog. Funny, eh? The versatile Jackman also gets to sing a few numbers.

Flushed Away is rated PG for "crude humor and language."

The DMR grades Flushed Away a B-.

The Dollar Movie Review Grading System: The Dollar Movie Review grades on a curve. Movies that make choices to be course or vulgar are downgraded a full to a half grade or more. Likewise, movies that don’t gross out or offend too much can be upgraded as a ‘thanks for trying’ attaboy. Flushed Away was downgraded a half-grade because it was a hair too crude.