Starring the voices of: Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis
Directors: David Bowers and Sam Fell
Category: I
For those who like their films laced with pop-culture references, Flushed Away will be like manna from heaven. The latest release from Aardman Animations is crammed with knowing nods to contemporary films and culture: in the opening sequence alone - when pet rat Roddy St James (voiced by Hugh Jackman) enjoys a day on his own in his owners' posh home, there are send-ups of Bond films and even Jackman's career (Roddy ponders whether to don a Wolverine costume - the X-Men character the Australian actor plays).
There's more to come when Roddy bungles an attempt to eject an intruding pub-crawling rodent and is flushed down the toilet into a rat underworld that's a mirror-image of London. Superman and Spider-Man films are spoofed, a pair of baddies yells 'To the Ratmobile!', and a cockroach reads Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis (about a man who turns into a cockroach). Ian McKellen reprises parts of his Magneto persona from the X-Men films when he voices a tyrannical toad trying to reshape the world; and Jean Reno revisits his 'contract killer from Paris' schtick as a henchfrog sent to eliminate Roddy and Rita (Kate Winslet), who stand in the way of the toad's masterplan.
For those familiar with British culture, there are parodies and references to all manner of idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, from fish dinners to Tom Jones, the obsession with soccer and England's status as perennial sporting underachievers. Directors David Bowers and Sam Fell have certainly pressed all the right Anglophile buttons - even down to the use of the Dandy Warhols' Bohemian Like You (once used in a UK ad campaign by Vodafone).