Flushed Away

Saw Flushed Away, a fairly winning Aardman animation film about an anthropomorphized pet rat who is kicked out of his cushy (if solitary) home and flushed down a toilet by a usurper.  There, he finds a bustling rat-themed parody of London, complete with Rolex Big Ben and American rat tourists.  He tries to return to the surface world and to home but along the way (as you might imagine) he learns a few lessons and discovers that maybe the status quo isn't for him any more.

I'll just say a short word about the animation: Aardman is known for their claymation however much of this film is obviously computer generated.  This is fairly off-putting at first because I was expecting warm, thumb-smudged clay and I got shiny, plastic-looking polygons.  You get used to it eventually and I think they either composited claymation with CGI or animated in the little nicks and fingerprints into some models, because I saw some on some characters.  Anyway...

The film is pretty fun - I got the sense that basically everyone was having a good time producing this film.  Ian Mckellen puts in a great, hammy performance as an evil toad and there's a French frog (of course) who has a lot of fun business (and also some not so fun - I loved the physical comedy, I didn't love the nationalistic teasing.)  the central plot of the film revolves around a romance which - okay whatever - but the film keeps zipping along.  I also liked the singing slugs who are the by-now-mandatory, anonymous, musical, marketable, recurring gags.

It's a fun film, not amazing, but definitely not a chore to sit through.  A film that might become a small favorite for someone.