Love those slugs

I went to see "Flushed Away" today with the wife and youngest daughter. It was a really fun movie and worth the time and money to see it.

Every character was well defined and it seemed that the humans behind the voices were having a lot of fun performing. The plot was decent for a cartoon and the pace was continuously fast from start to finish. The funniest characters on the screen were all the little slugs. They enhanced (and sometimes stole) every scene they appeared in. Their singing talents are second to none.

Outside of the slugs my favorite characters were Roddy (voiced by Hugh "Wolverine" Jackman) and The Toad (voiced by Ian McKellen, he of Gandolf and Magneto fame). That's not to say the others were bad; they were all excellent. But the slugs, Roddy, and The Toad just took my fancy.

There was obviously lots of English humor in the film. A sub theme to the whole movie was the World Cup, and at one point Roddy cries "The English are winning! Anything's possible!". Then there were the French frogs led by Le Frog (Jean Reno), cousin of The Toad, who has the obligatory mime in their midst and who at one point hold up their hands in surrender when mis-interpreting an order from Le Frog. And of course the movie made fun of Americans and their inability to understand 'real' football.

Little visual cues from other films were scattered throughout the picture. For example I saw stuffed rabbits in Roddy's room from the movie "Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" along with a stuffed Alex the lion from "Madagascar". I'm sure there were many others, and it's those kind of little "easter eggs" that makes you want to sit with the DVD and the remote looking for them.

"Flushed Away" is hugely funny, and worth at least one trip to the movies. I'm looking forward to getting the DVD when it comes out.

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