Flushed Away Review

Aardman's first feature in computer animation spends its running time pretending to be clay. The modellers built fingerprint dents and seam lines into the fur, kept the eyes wide and glassy, and blocked the action in the flat proscenium style the studio used in stop motion, and the trick mostly holds. What sells it is the world, a rodent London assembled out of human rubbish, where a washing machine is a tenement and a pinball table is a market square, packed with jokes nobody pauses to point at.

Ian McKellen plays the Toad as a wounded aristocrat nursing a grudge against the royal family, and Jean Reno turns up late as a French frog commanding a strike force with union rules. Jackman gives Roddy a preening Kensington drawl that curdles nicely into panic once the water rises. The singing slugs are the best running gag the studio has ever built.

Where it thins is the story, a stock chase with a countdown to a flood that generates urgency without stakes, and the romance between Roddy and Kate Winslet's Rita is assembled from parts rather than felt. The pace is relentless in a way the handmade films never were, and something patient gets lost in the speed.