Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006)

The final film made as a collaboration between Aardman and DreamWorks, Flushed Away features the voices of Hugh Jackman and an array of British acting heavyweights as an assortment of anthropomorphic rats and frogs, and as usual, adult viewers will enjoy identifying who's who, along with those witty jokes that sail right over the heads of the ostensible target demographic of children. Jackman's character, a flapping posh twit of a rat flushed into the sewers from his palatial Kensington digs, does appear to have been expressly written for Hugh Grant instead, and Bill Nighy as a dim-witted cockney henchman is decidedly leftfield casting, but it's clear they all have fun with it nevertheless, and it zips along breezily enough with a plot involving a toad gangster scheming to kill off the rat population of the sewers while the Jackman rat tries to get back home. All that said, you miss the warmth of Aardman's stop-motion style that the computer animation doesn't quite succeed in reproducing, and so when they finally got back to doing it the old-fashoioned way with Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists in 2012, it was a welcome reminder of what they bring to the animation world that no-one else does.

6/10