A title like “Flushed Away” is its own best warning.
Oh yes, it declares, there will be bathroom humor in this animated feature about a mouse who takes a wild porcelain ride to a cheery, rat-infested world and learns whether
he’s a man’s pet or a mouse.
So parents, ready yourselves and your tender young ones for the mildly scatological. Gird yourself for one too many gags made at a crotch’s expense. But be prepared too for many a refined chuckle.
From DreamWorks and Aardman, the clever folks who envisioned the strange world of “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” this energetic treat does what animated features ought to. It plunges us into a world we could never inhabit without the aid of wisecracking animals, inventive computer-graphics wizards and gifted writers, among them “Frasier” smarty-pants Christopher Lloyd and Joe Keenan and “Tracy Takes On …” scribes Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.
Roddy St. James (the voice of the ever-busy Hugh Jackman), lives in a gilded cage in London’s gilded Kensington neighborhood. When his boy owner leaves, he has the run of the swank digs. Super domesticated, Roddy lives a pop-
culturally aware existence amid other playthings. He takes a doll for a ride to catch the latest Bond out on DVD. He natters to all the inanimate objects as if they’re his dearest friends. Roddy’s life is marked by an emptiness he doesn’t admit to but struggles against.
Enter slovenly Sid (Shane Richie). A sewer rat expelled from the bowels of the apartment’s plumbing, he plays the catalyst to Roddy’s reckoning. Roddy tries to get rid of Sid, who has settled in for the World Cup on the telly. When push comes to shove, Sid bests him.
When he finally comes out the other end, he finds himself in a world that resembles a Tokyo of neon clutter, a Venice of toxically tinted canals, and, with all those rats, a topsy-turvy Disneyland.
And let’s not pretend the studios’ competing animation groups aren’t winking and nudging each other with every new toon. On his way down miles of drainage pipe, Roddy runs into a goldfish who asks “Have you seen my father?”
Roddy finds himself in the middle of some roiling muck. The “Great” Toad (Ian Mc-
Kellen), a great bore, has dispatched two rats (figuratively and literally) to retrieve a ruby believed to have come from a Buckingham Palace drain.
Rita (Kate Winslet), the finder of the gem, hopes to keep it. The jewel turns out to be something of a ruby herring. What the toad really needs is a cable that will help him open the floodgates on the rat’s underground metropolis.
The movie is flush with voice talent. As scavenger ship captain Rita, Winslet anchors the whole affair with a tone that has verve and nerve.
Andy Serkis and Bill Nighy amuse as the scrawny Spike and pink-eyed Whitey, the rodents who do Toad’s lushly enunciated bidding.
McKellen sounds to be having the time of his life, playing proud, wounded, and evil. Don’t wince, but he and French actor Jean Reno, as his cousin, Le Frog, give ribbiting turns.
And who knew there was such a thing as a sewer slug? But underground they abound. Their little eyes sway above their sickly soft bodies. They spook at the drop of a hat … er, rat. So there’s lots of mutual fright and simultaneous screaming. Their appearance as the occasional chorus isn’t wholly original (remember the serenading mice in “Babe”?), but they are a hoot just the same.
The chatter is as zingy for the adults in the theater as the action is zippy for the kiddies.
Those knowledgeable about the relationship between France and England might wonder for a moment if “Flushed Away” with its amphibious villains isn’t a bit of a primer in xenophobia. When Le Frog is asked by a character if he’s laughing at his pain, his reply is priceless.
“I laugh at everyone’s pain but my own. I am French.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
“Flushed Away” | *** RATING
PG for crude humor and some language|1 hour, 24 minutes|ANIMATION|Directed by David Bowers and Sam Fell; written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Chris Lloyd, Joe Keenan, Will Davies; voices by Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis and Shane Richie|Opens today at area theaters
