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Flushed Away | 13241__flushed_l
POTTY HUMOR High-class mouse Roddy (right, voiced by Jackman) discovers that life under London is a real sewer in Flushed Away
Flushed Away: Dreamworks Animation SKG
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Release Date: Nov 03, 2006; Rated: PG; Length: 78 Minutes; Genres: Animation, Kids & Family; With: Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet
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By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW

Flushed Away is being advertised as the new movie ''from the creators of Shrek and Madagascar,'' and while that's savvier than saying it's ''from the bedlam-happy folks who brought you Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,'' it isn't honest. The latest collaboration between DreamWorks and Britain's sublimely bent Aardman studio, Flushed Away is a true hybrid. It's the tale of an upper-crust pet mouse named Roddy St. James (voiced by Hugh Jackman as an ingratiatingly polite nerd) who gets flushed down a toilet and into the scavenger-happy sewer world under the streets of London. The movie has the fish-out-of-water arc you'd expect in a mainstream kiddie bash, as well as a sculpty CGI sheen that engagingly mimics, without quite reproducing, the thumbprint tactility of Aardman's clay-figure style. Yet it also has a great deal of the Aardman spirit. In the sewer, Roddy discovers a squalid, overstuffed metropolis of rodents, amphibians, and shabby discarded bric-a-brac (kitchen tools become power boats, cheap souvenirs priceless treasures), and characters who have imposing egos, whether it's the Toad, a genocidal frog king (an operatically funny Ian McKellen), still pining for when he was Prince Charles' pet, or a crew of maggots who burst into ''Don't Worry, Be Happy'' at just the right moment. Flushed Away lacks the action-contraption dottiness of a Wallace and Gromit adventure, but it hits its own sweet spot of demented delight.


Posted Nov 01, 2006
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