Flushed Away

Plot

Roddy St. James is a pet rat who lives in a large Kensington apartment. After his owners go on vacation, he takes advantage of being alone. That night, a sloppy sewer rat named Sid bursts out of the kitchen’s sink and decides to stay and watch the 2006 FIFA World Cup final. Imagining Sid taking over his life, Roddy demands Sid to leave, but Sid refuses and starts to treat him as a butler. He decides to take advantage of this and attempts to trick Sid into thinking that the apartment’s Jacuzzi-brand toilet is an actual Jacuzzi. Despite being sloppy, Sid knows about toilets. He pretends to be tricked before pushing Roddy into the water and pulling the lever. After landing in London’s sewer, he discovers Ratropolis, a sewer city made out of various bits of junk, resembling London.

He is told to seek out Rita Malone, an enterprising scavenger who works the drains in her boat, the Jammy Dodger and who might be able to help him get home. Roddy and Rita are abducted by rats, Spike and Whitey and brought before their boss, the Toad, as Rita stole back a ruby that was scavenged by her father. The Toad has a deep hatred of rodents to the point of hateful obsession. He plans to have Roddy and Rita frozen with liquid nitrogen, but the pair escape. Rita takes the ruby, and a unique electric master cable needed to control Ratropolis' sewer floodgates.

Roddy deduces that the ruby is actually a glass replica and easily breaks it, enraging Rita, who attacks him. Roddy offers Rita a real ruby if she takes him back to Kensington, to which she agrees. The pair stop to visit her family before setting off. During Roddy's stay, Rita’s younger brother, Liam, proposes to her and their father that they give Roddy to the Toad in exchange for money, but Rita and their father refuse to. Overhearing this, Roddy misinterprets that Rita wants to sell him out, so he reneges on the deal and steals the Jammy Dodger. When Rita catches up to him, she clears up the misunderstanding. The pair evade pursuit from Spike, Whitey, and their accomplices.

Incensed at his henchmen's failures, the Toad sends for his French cousin, Le Frog. The Toad recounts to Le Frog how his hatred of rodents originated, which he has told to Le Frog multiple times: Fifty years before the events of the film, the Toad was Prince Charles' favorite pet out of all of his pets. They did many things together until Charles’ birthday, where he was given a rat as a gift. Over time, Charles no longer favored the Toad and a one of his servants flushed the Toad down a toilet. Le Frog and his henchmen intercept Roddy and Rita to retrieve the cable, but the duo manages to escape out of the sewer drain and back to Roddy's apartment in Kensington, though the Jammy Dodger is destroyed.

Roddy delivers Rita the promised ruby as well as an emerald to build a new Jammy Dodger, then shows her around his apartment. She at first believes he has family but notices his cage and realizes he is a pet and alone. Rita tries to persuade Roddy to come with her, but he is too proud to admit his loneliness. Rita leaves the apartment by flushing herself down the toilet only for her to be kidnapped, with the Toad taking back the master cable. Roddy joins Sid to watch the game. When Sid warns him not to drink too much before half-time, he realizes that the Toad plans to open the floodgates during half-time, when every human in London will use their toilets, allowing the wave of drainage to wash away every rat in Ratropolis. Roddy entrusts Sid with his home and has Sid flush him down the toilet again. He frees Rita, and together they defeat the Toad and his henchmen by getting Toad and Le Frog's tongues stuck to moving gears and freezing the wave of drainage with liquid nitrogen. Hailed as a hero, Roddy agrees to stay in Ratropolis with Rita. Soon after, the two, as well as Rita's family, set off on the Jammy Dodger II.

In a mid-credits scene, when Tabitha, the daughter of Roddy's owners, finds Sid on the couch after she and her parents return from vacation, she introduces him to their new cat, much to his horror.

Voice cast

• Hugh Jackman as Roddy St. James, a pampered pet rat who lives in a Kensington luxury apartment with a wealthy British family. He is flushed down the toilet by Sid the sewer rat into the sewer drains.
• Kate Winslet as Rita Malone, a street-wise and rather aloof scavenger rat and the oldest child of her large family. She is the captain of the Jammy Dodger and Roddy's love interest.
• Ian McKellen as the Toad, a tyrannical, pompous, and aristocratic cane toad who wants to get rid of the entire population of Ratropolis to make room for his hundreds of offspring. For his performance, Ian McKellen won the Annie Award for Voice Acting in a Feature Production.
• Jean Reno as Le Frog, the Toad's annoyed French cousin. He refers to the Toad as "my warty English cousin". He masters martial arts and is the leader of a team of hench-frogs.
• Andy Serkis as Spike, one of the Toad's two top hench-rats. He is the quicker-witted and more aggressive of the two.
• Bill Nighy as Whitey, another of the Toad's two top hench-rats. Whitey is an albino rat, and Spike's partner. Unlike Spike, Whitey is sympathetic and less vicious but is also ignorant and gullible.
• Shane Richie as Sid, an over-weight and lazy sewer rat from the sewer drain. He is the one who flushes Roddy down his own toilet and is an acquaintance of Rita and her family.
• David Suchet and Kathy Burke as Mr. and Mrs. Malone respectively, Rita's parents
• Miriam Margolyes as Grandmum Malone, Rita's grandmother who has a crush on Roddy mistaking him for Tom Jones.
• Christopher Fairbank as Thimblenose Ted, another hench-rat who serves as the Toad's third-best enforcer after Spike and Whitey.
  • Fairbank also voices the cockroach living in the Malone household.

Production

The idea for a film about rats that fall in love in sewers was proposed by animator Sam Fell during the production of Aardman Animation's Chicken Run (2000). which had the working title Ratropolis. In 2003, David Bowers joined in to direct the film with Fell. Other writers were also later brought in to help write the script, including Frasier writers Christopher Lloyd and Joe Keenan, and Twins and Johnny English writer William Davies.

Traditionally, Aardman had used stop-motion for their animated features, but it was complex to render water with this technique, and using real water could damage plasticine models. It would have also been expensive to composite CGI into shots that include water, of which there are many in the movie, so the company chose to make Flushed Away their first all-CGI production. This is the third and final of three Aardman-produced films released by DreamWorks. Aardman's turbulent experience with DreamWorks during the making of this film and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit led to the split between the two studios.

Soundtrack

On Halloween (31 October) 2006, the Flushed Away: Music from the Motion Picture soundtrack was released by Astralwerks.

Home media

Flushed Away was released on DVD on 20 February 2007. It includes behind-the-scenes, deleted info, Jammy Dodger videos and all-new slug songs. It was released in the UK on 2 April 2007, where it was also packaged with a plasticine 'Slug Farm' kit. The film was released on Blu-ray by Universal Pictures Home Entertainment on 4 June 2019 around the world except for the UK. As of October 2010, 4.9 million units were sold.

In July 2014, the film's distribution rights were purchased by DreamWorks Animation from Paramount Pictures and transferred to 20th Century Fox before reverting to Universal Studios in 2018, following NBCUniversal's 2016 acquisition of DreamWorks Animation.

Reception

Critical response

Flushed Away has an approval rating of 72% on Rotten Tomatoes and an average rating of , based on 137 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads, "Clever and appealing for both children and adults, Flushed Away marks a successful entry into digitally animated features for Aardman Animations." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score to reviews from mainstream critics, gives the film a score of 74 out of 100 based on 28 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.

Todd McCarthy of Variety gave the film a negative review, saying "As directed by David Bowers and Sam Fell, first-time feature helmers with long-term Aardman affiliations, the film boasts undeniably smart and eye-catching qualities that are significantly diluted by the relentlessly frantic and overbearing behavior of most characters; someone is always loudly imposing himself upon another, to diminishing returns of enjoyment." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B+, saying "Flushed Away lacks the action-contraption dottiness of a Wallace and Gromit adventure, but it hits its own sweet spot of demented delight." James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film three out of four stars, saying "It's better than 90% of the animated fare of the last few years. It's refreshing not to have to qualify the movie's appeal by appending the words, 'for the kids'." Jan Stuart of Newsday gave the film two out of four stars, saying "Despite the efforts of five writers and Aardman's trademark puppets, with their malleable eyebrows and cheeks bulging like those of a mumps sufferer, none of these characters are particularly endearing." Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post gave the film a positive review, saying "Flushed Away, Aardman's first computer-generated cartoon, does away with the clay but leaves the craft and emotion intact, resulting in a film that earns its place among the Aardman classics." Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle gave the film three out of four stars, saying "The short attention spans of directors David Bowers and Sam Fell are mostly forgivable because the movie is filled with so many entertaining characters."

Richard Corliss of Time gave the film a negative review, saying, "Deficient in the comedy of reticence and discouragement that is Aardman's (or maybe just Nick Park's) unique strength. I don't want to say the Englishmen were corrupted, but I think they allowed their strongest, quirkiest instincts to be tethered." Ted Fry of The Seattle Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying, "Fans of Wallace and Gromit may be puzzled by a visual disconnect in Flushed Away. They will certainly, however, be delighted by the unrelenting whimsy and fast-paced gags of a story that never slows down to think about where it's going next." Ty Burr of The Boston Globe gave the film two and a half stars out of five, saying, "Kids will probably be in stinky-sewage heaven with the new computer-animated critter comedy Flushed Away, but even they may realize they're up the proverbial creek in a boat with a faulty motor." Jack Mathews of the New York Daily News gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying, "Though Flushed Away duplicates the stop-motion, clay animation look of Aardman's earlier Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit, it was made using computer software, and its liberated action sequences are truly dazzling."

Box office

Flushed Away collected $64.6 million in the United States, which was below the average of other CGI films from DreamWorks Animation, and $113.6 million from international markets for a worldwide total of $178.2 million, making it the 24th highest-grossing film of 2006, and the sixth highest-grossing animated film of 2006. The film opened at number three in its first weekend, with $18,814,323, behind Borat and The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause. Produced on a budget of $149 million, poor box office reception resulted in a $109 million write-down for DreamWorks Animation, and in turn, a termination of the partnership with Aardman Animations.

Video game

Main article: Flushed Away (video game){{!}}''Flushed Away'' (video game)

Coinciding with the film's release, a video game adaptation was released for the PlayStation 2, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS. Although it received negative reviews from critics, the game received an Annie Award for Best Animated Video Game.

Notes

References

References

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