Flushed Away
   BCast :
Animated with voices of Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Susan Duerden

Directors:
Sam Fell, Henry F. Anderson III, David Bowers

Rating:
PG for crude humor, language

Running time:
90 minutes
   In the animated Flushed Away, Aardman Animation's traditional Britisher-than-thou dry humor has been seasoned with bodily function and crotch jokes. Perhaps this is the price of mainstream acceptance.
   But if the film lacks the comedic purity of earlier Aardman efforts like Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were Rabbit, it remains a lively, funny romp that ought to please just about everybody in the family.
   Our hero is Roddy (voice of Hugh Jackman), the pet rat of a little girl in a posh London neighborhood. Roddy is pampered and secure and has never had to scramble for survival.
   So when he's flushed down the toilet and finds himself in the sewers of the city, he's completely out of his element. There's an entire civilization flourishing in these subterranean streams, all of it overseen by The Toad (voice of Ian McKellen), a criminal mastermind who's part Shakespearean ham actor and part Scorsese mobster.
   Roddy is caught between The Toad and spunky girl rat Rita (voice of Kate Winslet), who operates a tugboat service and possesses a priceless pink gem stolen from The Toad.
   There are numerous chases -- inventively staged and often terribly funny -- and some peripheral characters with running gags.
   Particularly delightful are the singing slugs who serve as a Greek chorus, often breaking into helium-voiced song. They're like the penguins in Madagascar.
   In contrast to the many stars who take voice work and then simply phone in their lines, Jackman gives a complete vocal performance, growing shrill during moments of panic or affecting an air of suave sophistication. Most of the time you're not even aware that it's Jackman. His efforts elevate Flushed Away to sublimely funny levels.
   McKellen and Winslet also seem to have dropped every shred of selfconsciousness and sound like they're having fun.
   Flushed is Aardman's first computer-generated film after decades of stopaction clay animation. Not that you'd know that right away. Although it was created digitally, the characters and settings are designed to look as if they were made out of clay. The animators even have developed programs that put big human fingerprints and other flaws on the characters' surfaces.
   Initially these computer-generated characters don't have quite as much personality as those rendered in laborious frame-by-frame clay animation. But Flushed Away grows on you, and by the time it reaches its slam-bam conclusion, you've bought into this fantasy world.

This story was published Friday, November 03, 2006