Rats!: "Flushed Away"

We rejoin the summer Aardman retrospective with the company entering a new era, and a difficult moment. By this point, the Bristol-based animators had formed a partnership with American giants DreamWorks, whose executives presumably hoped to convert what had previously been an uncommonly successful cottage industry into an all-out hit factory. More specifically, they were looking for product for Q4 of 2006 that would match the success of DreamWorks' big Easter release Over the Hedge (budget: $80m, final take: $340m). Aardman and DreamWorks' previous collab, 2005's Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, was essentially an extension of the Bristolians' short triumphs, with a built-in audience. (From a budget of $30m, it made $193m: everyone left the boardroom happy.) But Flushed Away proved a trickier sell. This time round, Aardman were starting from scratch; they were moving away from their specialist field of claymation into digimation; and they were determined to hang onto their signature Britishness at all costs. The story, engineered by co-director Sam Fell, Morph creator Peter Lord and sitcom legends Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais, was unusually attuned to class: it followed the progress of well-to-do Kensington house mouse Roddy St. James (voiced by Hugh Jackman) after he's flushed into the underworld of the London sewers. Beyond Jackman, the voice cast was a job lot of BAFTA's finest: Kate Winslet as the sort-of love interest, Ian McKellen - heard imitating Larry Grayson at one point - as underworld heavy The Toad, Bill Nighy as an albino hired thug, plus John Motson burbling about the England-Germany World Cup final going on in the background and - as the slobbish sewer rat who kickstarts the plot by booting Roddy down the khazi - TV's Shane Richie (yes, that Shane Richie), found at the point where he presumably felt Hollywood would surely come calling. It's all very 2006, then; so 2006, indeed, that the soundtrack not only features the Dandy Warhols' "Bohemian Like You" but Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl", the unofficial theme song of this era's mid-list family entertainments.

The result constitutes the one film in this retrospective that hasn't dated especially well, for multiple reasons. This was Aardman, the masters of clay, having to learn the ropes of digimation - then being framed as just as much an inevitability for the animation industry of 2006 as AI is being framed as the future of today. (In fact, animation subsequently developed in multiple directions, so nobody need feel too sad about uninstalling ChatGPT.) From its very first frames, Flushed Away looks horribly flat: we're watching recognisably Aardmanish characters capering in front of tentative, underdetailed, in some cases barely finished backdrops, with almost zero interaction between foreground and backgrounds. If it weren't for that distinctive character work, indeed, the film might resemble no more than those cheap Euro animations that get redubbed and repurposed as half-term screenfiller; even the inventive storytelling that Aardman were known for at this point seems to have been flushed away, replaced by the sight of a bunch of characters running around manically for 85 minutes. One or two titters remain, but this was all too clearly a halfway house for its makers, falling awkwardly between the aesthetic Aardman had been developing and nurturing with each careful thumbprint in the plasticine and the vulgar American product then running amok in the multiplexes. (I should note this was also the year of Disney's The Wild, Paramount's Barnyard and Sony's Open Season; it was not a golden age for animation.) There's lots more burping than Aardman would usually permit as a substitute for genuine wit, and twenty years later, any studio would struggle to get away with the line "my bum looks like the Japanese flag" (which has the ring of Seventies men Clement and LaFrenais) or a sequence in which an offscreen voice approximates the owner of a Chinese takeaway. (At the very least, they'd need a sensitive redub for the Asian market.) As it was, the film followed Roddy St. James down the toilet, barely recouping its excessive $149m budget internationally; there was no way of selling the movie outside the UK as anything other than an oddly parochial curio. (I mean, Shane Richie, for heaven's sake.) The partnership between the two studios dissolved shortly thereafter, but the Bristolians soon rallied. Next week's reissue: 2012's marvellous The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists!

Flushed Away returns to selected cinemas from Friday.