Toilet Humour A Basis For Movie

Illawarra Mercury

Thursday December 7, 2006

There's something about the Brits and their toilets. That's an obsession at the heart of Flushed Away, a new animated film from Britain's Aardman Studios, the film-makers who gave us Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit.

"We do like a good loo joke, don't we?" says Flushed Away co-director David Bowers. "I was actually afraid of them as a small child," adds co-director Sam Fell.

And then there were the rats.

"Rats and toilets, they sort of go together, eh?" Fell says.

So Flushed Away started life as a trip down the toilet. In the movie, a pampered house-pet rat (voiced by Hugh Jackman) loses his digs to an interloper, who flushes him into a secret parallel London of imitation double-decker buses, shops, pubs and boats, all whipped up from household items by inventive rats and frogs living down there.

"The real fun is filling this rat world with all these familiar objects," Fell says. "An egg whisk can become a waterbike, a passport can become, well, you'll have to look for that."

"We didn't want to make it too slick," Bowers says. "That's part of Aardman's charm."

It is. The studio - famed for its hand-modelled Plasticine figures, moved in tiny increments, and photographed, animated, stop-motion style - was setting a movie in a watery world of pipes and sweating walls and green sewage.

That is why this Aardman film, done for Shrek studio DreamWorks, looks a bit more like Shrek than anything they've done before. Blame it on the water, but Aardman isn't quite as handmade as it was.

"We wanted to do it all handcrafted, with Plasticine," Fell says. "Building this elaborate set, all of it. But it would've taken years and cost a fortune, all that water, for instance. And it wouldn't have looked right."

"All that water," Bowers says. "Couldn't get it to look right. We had our hearts set on making this a complete world, detailed. It simply wouldn't have been possible to do with the traditional way."

So they modelled the characters by hand, and digitised them, computer-animating the film's extensive action. But aside from that, it's vintage Aardman.

"Comedy is comedy," Bowers says. "And all the Aardman films, from the very beginning, have these references and jokes about earlier movies. That's all Chicken Run was, really."

"What do we have here?" Fell asks. "James Bond, Risky Business, Laurel and Hardy, Lara Croft. The chase, the sorts of jokes, they're universal, really."

After Chicken Run, the studio had no trouble landing the voice talent it wanted, from Jackman and Kate Winslet to Sir Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Bill Nighy and the one-and-only "Gollum", Andy Serkis, who plays a rat thug.

"Oh, they're very British, in that way they love tinkering, all this handcrafted looking and quirky," Serkis says. "And they give you the luxury of working with some of the voice actors you're appearing with.

"I did scenes with Bill Nighy in the booth, together, so that we could work out that whole Laurel and Hardy thing we did. It was funnier, and they went to the trouble to make it happen."

Bowers and Fell say that there will "always be an Aardman", even if the studio has to adjust what it does to battle rising costs.

"I don't think the old ways, stop-motion animation, will go away," says Bowers. "But with so much water and so much depth to this world, so many characters, so much action, we really did need to go CG. Aardman's previous films showed smaller worlds, rural settings, really.

"This one is a city, a whole world, really. I can see simpler films with fewer characters and no water being stop-motion."

Flushed Away opens in Australia on December 21.

© 2006 Illawarra Mercury

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