Flushed Away (2006)

Image credit: Flushed Away: Dreamworks Animation SKG

POTTY HUMOR High-class mouse Roddy (right, voiced by Jackman) discovers that life under London is a real sewer in Flushed Away

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.