BTW, I just got the DVD two days ago! YAY!!! (no stuffed slugs though )
I think they got rid of the hamsters, Vi, to make Roddy that much more alone. I mean, he's not really all by himself if he's got two butlers, is he?
You're so right Meg....that strengthens the story a lot.
It's just that a bunch of mags and websites were reviewing the DVD and saying how the film wasn't that great and how Aardman was smart to break it off with DW, etc...and how the hamsters probably would have been a good addition and how DW screwed up the film of course....I guess even I bought some of that DreamWorks-really-messed-up rhetoric without really thinking about it.....that just goes to show you how much anti-DW rhetoric is out there....
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
It’s nice to see the disc jump in at number one in the DVD sales and I hope a wider audience finds it and gets as much out of it as I did – Flushed Away deserves to be remembered for much more than the break-up of an otherwise strong partnership and will hopefully, in time, be singled out as perhaps the real best animated feature of the crowded 2006
Sooooooo true.
I hope.....that's my hope for every DreamWorks film actually(I know, of course, it's half-Aardman ).....that in time they'll be viewed differently. And even the "bad" ones' good qualities will be recognized.
I still can't believe that it didn't get an Annie Best pic nom.
Or an Oscar Best Animated Film nom.
(When it was so much better than the MANY animated films that came out this year.)
(I still really believe that it's largely the "bad blood" that caused the industry--both Animation and Hollywood--to turn up their nose at this film. That, and Al Gore bribing every movie critic and Academy judge. )
Oh, and btw: just thought you'd like to know how Entertainment Weekly saw fit to support a well-made artistic film like Flushed Away rather than cave into the crowd by encouraging the makers of this film when it got knocked out of the spotlight because of some other movie that wasn't even completely "animated":
"Just a thought guys: Their movie was about dancing penguins. Your movie was about a rat getting flushed down the sewer. Just sayin'."
Also this from Cinematical: (and it's not "one of a kind" either)
Review: Flushed Away -- James' Take
Posted Nov 3rd 2006 8:01AM by James Rocchi
Filed under: Animation, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Family Films, Dreamworks
What is it about kid's films? Or, rather, what is it about kid's films recently? Computer animation has made making kid's film's easier, it seems, based on the flurry of dreck like Chicken Little and The Barnyard; the better question is if computer animation has made releasing them too easy. The case in point this week is Flushed Away, the latest collaboration between Aardman Animation (Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run) and Dreamworks Animation (Shrek, Madagascar). Flushed Away combines two worlds - the design and aesthetic of Aardman's gentle, claymation stories with the computer-generated spectacle of Dreamworks' industrial approach to animation. The result is a curious, unfixed mix of the good, the bad and the ugly -- while Flushed Away has a certain English whimsy to it, it also has the overstuffed, joke-a-millisecond kind of excess that executives think render animated films breezy trifles, but actually turns them into leaden chores. Or, put another way: In Flushed Away, a group of minion frogs in the service of a mercenary bad guy known as Le Frog (and voiced by Jean Reno) are given the order to action; they immediately hurl up their hands and cry "We surrender!" Is this funny, to a kid? Is it funny to any grown-up whose I.Q. is higher than their belt size?
Before Le Frog enters the arena, though, Flushed Away begins as pampered house pet rat Roddy (voiced by Hugh Jackman) is left alone as his owner leaves the house for a holiday. Roddy promptly goes on a high-spirited spree, playing with all the toys and dolls and neat geegaws, but we also notice he's a bit lonely. A plumbing mishap leads loud, boisterous rat Sid (Shane Richie) to Roddy's home, and soon Roddy is plunged into the toilet and out of his paradise. In the sewers, Roddy finds a small London, underground -- a teeming Rodent-opolis of families, commerce and bustling activity. Roddy's quest to get back home brings him to the dock of ship's pilot Rita (voiced by Kate Winslet), who may be able to get him to the surface -- but that's waylaid by the manipulations of the silken-voiced mastermind known as The Toad (Ian McKellen), who's plotting to wipe the sewer rodent-opolis away. ...
... And I hope you could follow that, because I barely could while in the theater. There are Aardman animation touches here -- little sight gags like a container of liquid nitrogen that reads "WARNING: RATHER COLD" and quieter physical bits like when a group of slugs run from danger as fast as they can, which is to say, not very fast at all. Or the fact that the computer-animation replicates the imperfect, jittery frame rate of clay-mation Aardman-style mouth-movement and subliminally reminds us of the hand-shaped charms of Wallace and Gromit. But that gracious, gentle sense of understatement gets blasted off the screen by the barrage of pop-culture references thrown at the screen; there are seven separate names in the writing credits of Flushed Away, and that's not even including all the names listed in the final credits who contributed 'additional material.' So we get a brief splash of Roddy in James Bond gear re-creating the opening credits -- and, again, do kids get that? Does that mean anything to them?
Ironically, Flushed Away succeeds the most when it tries the least -- in the gentle scenes contrasting Rita's bustling family with Roddy's empty privilege, or in the simple daffyness of Toad's masterplan, or even in the film's affection for convoluted Rube Goldberg-style slapstick and well-timed physical comedy. But those moments are few and far between in an ocean of animation in-jokes, belch comedy and incredibly stale cultural stereotypes.
The animation in Flushed Away is the best that money can buy, of course, which means it's very good in a sort of off-the-rack fashion; there's no feeling of sensibility or shape or vision to the material that might have come from a single human being as opposed to a committee. (Say what you will about Pixar's Cars, but at the very least, after watching it, you knew that John Lassetter really, really, really likes cars.) The character designs have flashes of wit -- with his corpulent, comfortable air of menace, Toad looks as if Sydney Greenstreet were, in fact, actually green -- and it's hard to not feel a flash of attachment thanks to vocal performances from actors of the caliber of Winslet or Jackman. But in the end, Flushed Away feels less like something hand-crafted to fill some artist's creative need and more like an industrial product hurried off the line as the end result of the work of many hands to fit a release slot and match up with the street date of the videogame tie-in.
Notice how he had to start the review with all the "This is just another one of those talking animal/CGI/jokes every minute films" diatribe.
See why I have such a chip on my shoulder?
Yeah, I think I already knew John Lassetter really, really likes Cars. Does that alone make the film worthwhile? Uh, no.
(not that there weren't other things I thought were well done in the film)
Last edited by ShyViolet on March 11th, 2007, 10:50 pm, edited 2 times in total.
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
I watched Flushed Away last night. I can't say I loved it, but I did like it more than Open Season and probably more than Over the Hedge. I still liked Cars better, as well as Monster House. (I haven't seen Happy Feet yet.) For me, FA didn't quite gel. The action was too fast at times, and anytime a fart joke makes it into an animated film, it always drops way down in my rankings. (I know, one should have expected toilet humor in a movie centered around a toilet trip, but still...) Of course, it's hard to find an animated film these days without a fart joke, sadly.
I wasn't bored with it, but neither was I hugely entertained. I felt like it gathered steam as it went, though, and by the end it had won a "thumb's up" from me. It just felt like DW and AArdman don't quite blend. I like Aardman's quirkiness, but feel it works better when it has more time to breathe. I found the Wallace and Gromit movie to be a disappointment, too, as I love the short films with them, but thought Curse of the Were-Rabbit was a bit of a snoozer.
So, I'm looking forward to seeing Aardman team up with someone else.
BTW, I'm not bashing DreamWorks here. I just think that the Aardman partnership wasn't as ideal as we all hoped it would be.
BTW, I'm not bashing DreamWorks here. I just think that the Aardman partnership wasn't as ideal as we all hoped it would be.
I agree...I wish they had stayed together, maybe they could have. Or maybe they were just too different.
I guess it's like any relationship--it's just the way it goes and you never really know what might have been.
(IMO it's sort of like the Disney/Pixar thing--they also have very different sensibilities and that's why it's kinda hard for them to "mesh" sometimes. But that's for another thread! )
So we get a brief splash of Roddy in James Bond gear re-creating the opening credits -- and, again, do kids get that? Does that mean anything to them?
Considering the fact that this film came out almost exactly the same time as Casino Royale (they're two weeks apart) and that we've had three Bond films in the last five years, well....
Sorry, I just couldn't let that go!!
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
And....one more thing. One reviewer actually tried to say: "Hey, look! Another pop-culture reference" in that the title Flushed Away was parodying the title "Spirited Away" from Miyazaki.
Uh-huh. That would be quite a feat, considering that I remember reading about Flushed Away as a co-venture back in 2001, and Spirited Away came out in 2002.
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
The title has nothing to do with anything. That's a lame, lame, lame connection.
BTW, for folks knocking the animation, something I didn't quite mention in the review as such was that this is a quiet little breaktrhough, making CGI mimic the kinetic look of stop-motion. While it was slightly more fluid there's no denying that the characters has more in keeping with their clay counterparts than DWs usual rounded animals.
Surprised you didn't get a bigger amount out of it Rand, I just thought the whole thing was a "happy" picture and quite fresh rather than the by-the-numbers we've been getting on Madagscar, The Wild, Over The Hedge and, especially, Open Season.
Oh, I certainly appreciated that Flushed Away was different than all those others. It does stand apart and was indeed "fresher" than all those other animals-on-an-adventure films; but "different" doesn't necessarily mean "great", and for me I was just a tad disappointed in the execution.
YAY!!! 
(no stuffed slugs though 
