I won’t go back into how I felt about Aardman’s last movie Curse of the Were-Rabbit, except to say, in short, I thought it ultimately very overrated, so I wasn’t very excited about this, their latest. I was surprised, then, to find I loved this one nearly as much as the rest of the planet seemed to love the Wallace and Gromit movie. I mean, just give me 90 minutes of the slugs and the miming frog here and I’d be heaps happier than I was with the Anti-Pesto boys. I literally think I laughed more in the average 2 minutes of Flushed Away than I did in the whole of Curse. As I’ve said before, I love the Wallace and Gromit shorts, I love Creature Comforts, Chicken Run was okay, but Curse was so over-filled with unfunny, “oh look how clever I am ‘cos I can read the innuendo what’s written on the tin he’s wearing!” gags it made me sick. That kind of humour is much reduced here, though it’s still present for those who like it – one end credit, for example, reads, “no slugs were a-salted during the making of this film,” ho-ho, no, to be honest, that one actually made me giggle, I guess the rest of the movie weakened my guard a little.

But it wasn’t just the Aardman connection responsible for my total lack of enthusiasm for this movie. Like so many of this year’s animated features I ended up rather enjoying a lot more than I expected – Over the Hedge, The Ant Bully, Monster House, even Cars – the animation just didn’t look right to me in trailer form. I’ve read a lot of reviews saying, like, ‘wow, it’s amazing how they recreated the plasticine look in CG’ ... let me perhaps be the first to warn people: no, it isn’t, this is just claymation devotees in denial. This movie looks CG … but that’s no bad thing – and really, has CG ever been bad in the right hands since Pixar broke the ice in 1995? I say this ‘cos, going back to Curse of the Were-Rabbit, one of the things that always bugged me about the praise lavished on it was how suddenly it became hip to say CG was bad, all that, ‘wow, look, he left fingerprints on the clay,’ business to which my response was just, err, wtf? Yes, CG can be terrible, evil even – but, y’know, considering we’re only just out of the first decade of it being used for animated features? I don’t think it’s doing too bad. Anyway I guess that point is moot now since the Aardman fans have probably already proclaimed that Nick Park and co have somehow re-discovered the lost art of pixel pushing.

Ahem. Sorry. I shouldn’t read IMDb message boards.

Anyway, the story and the characters are strong enough that it actually wouldn’t matter how it looks (though to my eyes it looks fine, though far from the best of the year). My face completely lit up when I saw the miniature underground London set – this movie might not be a masterpiece, but I found it about 1000% more original and absorbing than anything Aardman have ever done. It’s just more …. I don’t know, fun! and less … well, full of its own pathetically endearing Britishness, and I don’t care how that sentiment makes me sound. Maybe it’s the fact that CG is quicker – maybe they felt they could be a bit more slapdash about it, and that little bit of loosening up really comes over for me.

I don’t know. I babble. I just liked it.

Great soundtrack, too, and Harry Gregson-Williams’ score is just the icing on the song selections (and the slugs that sing some of them :)).

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 2:25 pm in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.