Well curiosity got the best of me (along with the 'why not?' factor of netflicks) and I finally watched this one. It's almost worth a review believe it or not--not so much because it was great but rather because it was...well..weird (you probably saw this coming.) Terms like quality always have to be augmented by the actual content of the story, and Flushed Away definitely makes one scratch their head about just what scripts get off the ground and which ones don't. First off, we have singing slugs, second we have evil French ninja frogs (also mime frogs) who plan on taking over the underworld sewer rat kingdom by drowning them with a toilet surge from the half-time urinary needs of football, and of course 3rd we get a touching message: why live up in the city as a pet rat when you could live in the sewer with a hot female rat babe who makes her money by driving her boat through sewage?

The weirdness (and spare maggot jokes) aside, Flushed Away has fairly weak 3D animation by current standards (though I think this might be their first entry, and to be honest I'm very much spoiled by Ratatouille) and the film suffers from too much hyperactivity. If you somehow divorce the plot from the weirdness, it is pretty standard fare; spiced up with lots of adult humor (groin punches, poop and fart jokes, even the female lead's pants getting pulled off!) Speaking of the humor, at times it is fairly witty (relatively speaking of course) and moves along very fast. I think we're still stuck in this paradigm of trying to do two movies at once (the ones the kids watch and the ones the parents watch), and this in part may be driving movies like this to be weirder and less coherent as more random, simpson-esque stuff is stuck between the mandatory adventure plot for kids (though I could see most youngins enjoying all the raunchy humor as well--maybe more than the parents.)

When all is said and done, the most significant thing about this film is that it IS Aardman and this is their first shot (at least as far as I know) at making the switch over to 3D graphics. Unfortunately it also shows them becoming much more like other US films like Shark Bait, though Flushed Away is a million times weirder than its American cousins. Still, it will take more than one very odd film about rodents falling into the toilet to convince me that Aardman has lost their ways. If nothing else, the film is still wildly creative in its content.

And as a passing thought, while I do not object, just how many movies about rats have their been recently?

To add a bit here (from the internet)--apparently Flushed Away being all-CGI was Dream Works idea, and the whole affair seems to have killed any further relationship between Aardman and Dreamworks(probably a good thing.) Compared to Were-rabbit and Chicken Run, Flushed Away simply isn't a good film; and that taint is very much a dreamworks thing; so hopefully we'll see Aardman abandoning this sort of work and going back to what they do well.

Thanks Chris! If you would like to submit a review drop me a line at Fourth Movie or Main page.