Not a fairy tale and not a comedy – purely an adventure cartoon, “Flushed Away!” – is pleasing to the eye primarily with its inventive staging. The garbage (sewer) existence of rats, mice, frogs, and snails gave a rich impulse to the imagination of directors Sam Fell and David Bowers. All sorts of junk and scrap (from socks and underwear to flying mixers and floating umbrellas) fill the computer world with pleasant surprises, constantly updating and amusingly playing on disproportions.
Visual Delights and Inventive Staging
“Huge” underpants become a parachute for a small “mouse” in human form.
A Human Story in a Rodent World
The second find is a purely “human” plot, although the rodents and amphibians are drawn convincingly. The beginning of the cartoon remotely resembles “The Prince and the Pauper,” when a domestic mouse and a garbage rat swap places. It continues like “Pippi Longstocking” – the mouse meets the red-haired Rita, a child of the underworld with pirate inclinations, and they begin a “feuding” romance. Then something like “Thumbelina” is included: the lovers run away, and they are pursued by a toad with a frog cousin. “Thumbelina” is remembered because the theme of loneliness is unobtrusively carried out. But everything is decided in a strictly “modern” manner, and each of those present guesses not fairy-tale characters, but heroes of the latest action films. The degree of “adventure” is like in “Romancing the Stone” (1984) (there is also a ruby here, by the way), Rita’s fighting nature is not inferior to Lara Croft, and the toad is mowing under all the planetary villains at once from all the Bondiana series.
Assimilating Cinematic Achievements
It is interesting to consider, because the cartoon of the new generation easily assimilates all the accumulated “living” achievements. If in Batmaniana the “penguin” sewage system required almost theatrical convention, in “Flushed Away!” the underground world organically joins the well-known “acid” “post-apocalyptic” worlds of blades and nirvanas. Only with flying mixers. And the cartoon does not parody, but recreates with its own means the giant frozen wave from “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004). And the inclusions of a musical with snails under umbrellas in it are no less bright than in live musicals. And the light over the artificial city with different strange creatures corresponds to “Star Wars”. And some Tom Cruise is unlikely to be able to compete with the “waterfall” adventures in the toilet, although they add adrenaline – be healthy.
Missed Opportunities for Deeper Meaning
One can only regret the excessive enthusiasm of the authors for the animated “matter” to the detriment of “soulful conversations”. That is, their visual and technical potential is no less than that of Miyazaki, but there is less meaning. “Flushed Away!” simply shows very well how harmful Hollywood “family” is to talented people. In it, everything goes to forcibly falling into childhood. And the invented sewage system, in contrast to the glamorous world of the Kensington mansion with completely charming dolls, made it possible to make the “human” plot much more significant, caustic and sarcastic, convertible by age. That is, children would not be bored, but adults would not be bored either. In short, the cartoon lacked torn condoms as sleeping bags – it lacked healthy cynicism.
The Power of Voice Acting
Here, such a moment as the list of original voice acting is also important. Dubbing Ivan Urgant and Yana Churikova are normal and will not remove anything from this plot.
But the very names of Kate Winslet, Hugh Jackman, Sir Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Andy Serkis and Bill Nighy, who spoke for rats and frogs, evoke so many associations that much more meaning could have been made on them. It was a sin not to take advantage of this.