This year, DreamWorks Animation celebrates its 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Callie Petch is going through their entire animated canon, one film a week for the next 30 weeks, and giving them a full-on retrospective treatment. Prior entries can be found here, should you desire.
13] Flushed Away (3rd November 2006)
Budget: $149 million
Gross: $178,120,010
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 75%
I hated Flushed Away.
As a 12 year-old kid in 2006, I hated Flushed Away. I was there opening weekend, with my dad and brother in tow, sold on the fact that it was Aardman and that Aardman had never done me wrong before. I was hyped, I was ready, and I was left feeling dissatisfied and confused. I did not like Flushed Away and I had no idea why. The whole film felt off, it felt wrong, it didn’t feel like Aardman. Let’s not forget, I was going off of DreamWorks films at the time and, though I was about to enter my stupid teenager phase where one rejects everything they loved as a child out of hand (because they are stupid teenagers), their joints with Aardman were the only confident signs I had of them putting out quality during this winding down period in our relationship.
And I didn’t like Flushed Away. But it was Aardman! Aardman aren’t supposed to make bad stuff, with the exception of Angry Kid! That confusion and disappointment stuck with me. It stuck with me for a real long time. It festered and festered, until it manifested itself as full-blown hate. There may have been good elements to Flushed Away, but the sheer level of disappointment that the film had visited upon me had completely crushed those elements. Therefore, I was absolutely dreading this part of the retrospective, exactly as much as I was Shark Tale – OK, maybe not, but close. Expectations were low, I had never really gotten over the film the first time, and this series is only 1 month removed from the commonly accepted nadir period of DreamWorks Animation.
So… I strongly dislike Flushed Away. I don’t hate it anymore, the pain has finally subsided, I’ve come to terms with my grief, and I managed to have some fun with it because it’s not a bad film or anything, but I still very much dislike it. The reason why is basically the same as the reason why I hated it when I was young and impressionable. Flushed Away feels like DreamWorks trying to make an Aardman film, or Aardman trying to make a DreamWorks film, take your pick. Considering how much the two companies allegedly butted heads with one another during production, which represented the final straw in relations between the pair, I’m not surprised that the film feels that way. For example, this was supposed to be a pirate-based film, but DreamWorks nixed the idea believing back in 2001 that pirate movies didn’t sell – Aardman would get to make their pirate movie after all, but we’ll get to that shortly.
Yet, at the time, not a single credited writer on the film is actually affiliated with DreamWorks. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, for example, were responsible for The Likely Lads franchise, many episodes of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and the entirety of Porridge. Simon Nye, the film’s other credited writer, was responsible for Men Behaving Badly. Yet the whole film feels so… American, like 27 DreamWorks execs were all crowding around each writer’s shoulder micro-managing every line for maximum commercial appeal. As such, there’s this awkward compromise between the cheap, easy, toilet and pop-culture obsessed humour of DreamWorks films and the witty, clever, pun-focussed, heart-felt and quintessentially British humour of Aardman productions, where the latter is done as cynically as one can manage and where the former vastly overshadows the latter to such a lowbrow degree.
The film making said incredibly American view of England, by having the villain be heavily obsessed with tacky British predominately royal memorabilia, really doesn’t help proceedings. It instead marks them out with a giant arrow of “Look! British things! Y’know? Fish and chips, World Cup, broad working-class accents, ‘ello ‘ello, Benny Hill and all that!” It feels insulting, references that broad, that obvious, the equivalent of a Yank thinking that all of England is exactly like the London they read about in a particularly useless encyclopaedia from the mid-1970s. Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run were similarly classically British, but they felt more genuine because the films weren’t stopping every five seconds to show off their British credentials.
Case in point, the moment where Roddy realises that Sid will ruin his solitary bachelor lifestyle if he hangs around is backed by, of all sodding things, “Yakety Sax”. Why? Who knows; the incredibly short daydream sequence doesn’t seem to reference any part of any Benny Hill sketch, the show that basically appropriated that track for its own ends. It’s just there because a funny music cue was required, for some reason, and since this is supposed to be a British film we should pick the most British song available! To be honest, I’m pretty sure the only reason why there isn’t a bonding sequence between Roddy and Rita set to “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” is because rights to songs by The Beatles are really bloody expensive. It’s all so cringeworthy.
Speaking of, music cues in Flushed Away are primarily of the licensed variety, another creative choice that reeks of studio interference from upon high (note how nearly every important scene in both Shrek movies covered so far has been backed by licensed music). Roddy’s trip down the loo to the sewer is backed by “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” by JET because the song sounds cool to soundtrack scenes to, although anybody who actually knows the song and tries to get caught up in it will be driven mad by the awkward editing to keep it at some instrumental part. There’s a chase set to “Bohemian Like You”, again seemingly because it’s a cool song to soundtrack scenes to. They are, I’m not disputing that, but the score is perfectly serviceable in and of itself and, again, their inclusion doesn’t have any reason beyond being cool songs to back things with – there’s none of the irony or joke-enhancing choices present in Pirates!’ usage of punk, ska and Flight of the Conchords.
Well, unless they’re sung by the film’s most obvious comic relief, The Slugs. See, unlike with Wallace & Gromit, which kept the appearance and usage of the bunnies to a minimum lest they run the risk of becoming this, Flushed Away keeps forcing in a group of slugs purely for the kids to laugh at. They always just happen to be hanging around somewhere for a quick gag involving their high-pitch screams or Alvin & The Chipmunks singing of pop songs. Also unlike the bunnies, they feel really shoehorned in, like one of said 27 execs noticed that the script didn’t have enough pop culture references or kid-exclusive gags and that must be rectified ASAP! They only do the pop song thing twice, the other two times they do original compositions – which are eeeeehhh… “Ice Cold Rita” has Hugh Jackman singing going for it, but that’s about it – but they both feel incredibly unnecessary and a scene in which a group of slugs sing “Mr. Lonely” is going to feel like it’s going out of my way to annoy me, regardless of whether it runs for 10 seconds or 10 minutes.
When I keep mentioning “broad” in service of describing the humour, I mean that it’s lowest common denominator stuff. Extended fart and burp jokes, which Wallace & Gromit admittedly also indulged in once or twice. Toilet humour in the literal and figurative sense. Pop culture references where a thing is presented to you and you are expected to laugh due to recognising it – like a moment where the character voiced by Hugh Jackman tries to decide between wearing an Elvis Presley suit or a Wolverine suit – even extending to frequent, frequent cameos and references to past Aardman productions, to the point where it starts to feel less like little Easter eggs for more attentive and knowledgeable viewers and more like blatantly calling out their much better works to excuse what we’re watching. “Look! We made Wallace & Gromit! DreamWorks made all these films! We’re not normally this sub-par, honest!”
The puns, meanwhile, the bread and butter of many an Aardman production, feel really cynically calculated rather than genuine. A groaner of a bad pun can still elicit laughs if the person who is writing or delivering the pun is completely sincere in their telling of it; this is why Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a near-non-stop gag-fest. Flushed Away’s puns, by contrast, feel… forced. Again, the majority of the film feels like DreamWorks trying to make an Aardman film but not getting why Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit worked. So you get threatening mob bosses telling their goons to put people “on ice” and then we find out that he means literally freezing them in an ice machine, followed by the even worse “prepare to meet your maker, your ice maker!” But they just end up landing with loud notable thuds instead of laughter-in-spite-of-oneself.
At least they’re not lazy, though. A surprising number of the gags here are extremely easy and very lazily delivered. Le Frog and his ninja frog henchmen are all walking French stereotypes and whilst you can make those jokes funny, as Muppets Most Wanted proved this year, here they just feel like yet another “Oh, look! We’re British! We get British customs! Look at how British we are!” Roddy’s fall from Toad’s lair involves not one unfortunate crotch shot, not two unfortunate crotch shots, but four unfortunate crotch shots, one straight after the other for about 20 seconds of film time; a gag the film does again later on but with slightly different parameters. There’s a brief bit of random uncomfortable racism where Roddy accidentally dials a Chinese takeout and his attempts at communicating his situation are, thanks to the operator’s accent, hi-lariously misinterpreted as ordering Chinese food. It’s all just so cheap.
And yet this film cost $149 million to make! Not that all of that made it into the finished film, you understand. The constant re-writes and do-overs ended up inflating the budget to nearly twice the combined budgets of Chicken Run and Curse of the Were-Rabbit. There was an initial trailer that predominately showed Roddy having hamster man-servants named Gilbert and Sullivan, only for them to be dropped totally in the final film. Of course, this isn’t a problem in and of itself, I almost guarantee you that every animated film undergoes some giant fundamental change at some point during its production, but the film does such a poor job at hiding that. The central story dynamic remains about the same throughout, think a gender-swapped version of “Common People” by Pulp played straight, but everything else is a giant mess.
For example, Toad honestly feels kinda pointless to overall proceedings or, at least, as the big overall villain. As somebody who needs to pair Rita and Roddy together and drive the opening segment of the film, he makes sense. As somebody who becomes a big overall villain who wishes to wipe out the entirety of the sewer so that we can have our big action finale? No, he doesn’t, especially since said finale feels entirely rudimentary instead of earned and its existence requires the heroes to be unbelievably wilfully stupid. The main emotional centre of the film, the burgeoning respect and all-but-explicitly-stated romance of Roddy and Rita, also feels false. I never really bought it, that derogatory “Common People” comparison sticking with me a lot, and I never really found Roddy or Rita to be particularly interesting or consistent characters. Roddy flits back and forth schizophrenically between out-of-his-depth and try-too-hard-suave, whilst Rita spends all of her time talking tough but needing immediate rescue and help whenever action kicks off like a female Scrappy Doo.
As for the animation, which one would think I was OK with seeing as I’ve spent forever tearing into the script and neglecting it, it hasn’t aged well. I appreciate the attempt to recreate the Aardman claymation style in CGI, to try and keep the house style, but a hell of a lot of the enterprise, Up-Top especially, now looks like an even lower-quality version of the graphics used to power Telltale Games’ Wallace & Gromit series. Character models clearly try and recall the handmade plasticine models that became the Aardman calling card, but the bodies move too fluidly for the purposefully cut-and-replace mouth movements to gel with. Rita, Roddy and Sid also look way too human. In fact, let’s not beat around the bush, all of the cast look way too human, to such an extent that the good rats may as well just be human. This technique would work if it were primarily limited to Roddy – him being an upper class pet, it would make sense for him to have humanlike movements – but everybody does it, to such an extent that they may as well just be human.
I get why Aardman chose to go CG. The story takes place in a sewer, that requires a lot of water, you do not expose clay figurines to water, that is a stupid idea. But considering the film we have, one that feels less like Aardman and more like a very sub-standard DreamWorks film, I can’t help but feel like it was yet another demand from upon high by the overlords at DreamWorks. A desire to standardise even further, homogenise a unique voice in search of the more lucrative general audiences, and seeing as the script has received the sufficient amount of corporate retooling why not extend it to the whole style of animation too? I know that that didn’t happen, but it still makes a tonne of sense considering the film Flushed Away ended up as.
To its credit, Flushed Away is still Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, comfortably at that. Many reviewers threw around lines like “Best Animated Film Of The Year”, although 2006 wasn’t really a good year for animated film in Empire’s defence. Many reviews were still relatively soft in the praise department, though; one even noting that “the Aardman magic is missing.” And then there were the negative reviews, more than Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit combined; many lamenting the loud broad nature of the film, the generic nature of the film itself, the extreme anthropomorphism of its cast, and the fact that it was set in a sewer because The Guardian can be really unprofessional with its reviews a lot of the time (a little something to remember next time you want to take me to task for my review of Mrs. Brown’s Boys D’Movie). For the first time, Aardman looked human to a lot of critics.
Financially… well, the film was doomed to failure as soon as its budget swelled to $100 million, the highest grossing Aardman film is still Chicken Run ($224 million) and a film isn’t considered a success until it has doubled its budget. Nevertheless, Flushed Away marched ahead to a noble failure anyway. The film debuted in third in America, behind a limited release Borat and a wide-release The Santa Clause 3 (side note: Santa Clause 3 happened, folks). Paramount execs – DreamWorks’ new distribution partners, let’s not forget – tried to spin that as a surpassing of the expectations and therefore a good thing, but the arrival of Happy Feet in Week 3 and Flushed Away’s resultant descent into oblivion more than likely put pay to that. Overseas, the film performed strongly, particularly in France and Aardman’s native Britain, enough to get the film technically in the black, but the film still caused DreamWorks to ultimately take a $109 million write-down due to its near-total failure domestically.
So, the film was a failure, it didn’t knock every critic for six, and it took a giant bath at the box office. Combine these factors with the termination of their contract with DreamWorks, and the very public television failures of Creature Comforts USA and Chop Socky Chooks, and one could be forgiven for thinking at the time that Flushed Away was like some kind of Grim Reaper herald for Aardman. That’s a pretty big tailspin to pull out of, after all. Fortunately, as evidenced by the fact that we have a Shaun the Sheep movie due from them in a few months’ time, things managed to turn around for the company after making that breakaway.
For starters, in 2007, they found a new partner for feature-filmmaking, in the shape of Sony Pictures Animation – who, if Hotel Transylvania 2 and Genndy Tartakovsky’s Popeye end up as successful as I think they will be, are about to become a major known player in this field. They even renewed their contract with them in 2010 – although they seem to be on their own again for Shaun the Sheep after production on Pirates! ended up more than a little troubled. In 2011, they returned to the all-CG way of doing things with Arthur Christmas and, this time, managed to earn critical acclaim and a relatively decent profit. Then, in 2012, Aardman finally got to make their pirate movie, in the shape of The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! That too received critical acclaim, although an apparently bowlderised US edit and a release date quite literally the week before The Avengers meant that its box office gross was underwhelming.
So though they may struggle to reap giant financial rewards, Aardman have clearly gotten their mojo back since their “amicable” split from DreamWorks. More importantly, you watch either Arthur Christmas or The Pirates! and one can clearly get the sense that Aardman are getting to make the films that they want to make again. Those films are quintessentially British in a way that doesn’t involve them having to loudly announce and restate that fact every five minutes in the broadest and most obvious way possible, like we’ll run it out of town if it doesn’t have sufficient British credentials. Those films have a heart and soul that makes their puns and ridiculously silly humour charming and endearing instead of boring and annoying. Those films are clearly made for the filmmaker’s artistic benefit instead of aiming for the widest possible audience.
In other words, they’re everything that Flushed Away is not. Again, I don’t hate Flushed Away, I found enough funny sequences (especially the “he’s gonna steal your boat” exchange and the frog mime) to feel like I wasn’t wasting my time, but it is an awkward attempt to marry two distinct styles and identities that don’t gel well with one another. It doesn’t feel like an Aardman film, and it’s not a very good DreamWorks film, so the result is just the worst of both worlds, coupled with the disappointment of it being a sub-par Aardman film.
Investors in DreamWorks Animation were likely spending a lot of 2006 scratching their heads. Not only had the company’s two films for the year underperformed, they had managed to drive away the part of their company that was capable of bringing in critical acclaim. Many investors, more than likely, were getting nervous. Had DreamWorks already lost it? Was their investment for nothing? Then Shrek the Third happened and, like all sequels to still-lucrative properties, set everyone who was focussed on the bottom-line’s minds at ease. Next week, in our final instalment before a week’s hiatus, we take a look at the moment where I all but cut the cord with the company.
A brand new entry in The DreamWorks Animation Retrospective will be posted every Monday at 1PM BST.
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