Flushed Away

David Bowers and Sam Fell direct the first feature the British studio Aardman made entirely inside a computer, and water is the reason. Fell has said there was so much water in the picture that stop frame would have meant hundreds of effects shots, whereas in the computer the same work was straightforward. The image was then built to imitate stop motion anyway. Lip sync uses replacement mouth pieces rather than the smooth interpolation of computer animation: at least ten mouths were modelled for each character, and between 25 and 30 for the Toad. Fell asked his modellers to make the figures asymmetrical and knock the edges out. No thumbprints were added to the surfaces; the crew thought that would be a conceit. Production ran five years. This was the third and last Aardman feature DreamWorks released: a budget of 149 million dollars returned 178 million worldwide, the studio took a write-down of 109 million, and the partnership ended. At the Annie Awards it won five, for effects, character animation, production design, writing and Ian McKellen’s voice work, while Cars took best animated feature. A good fit if you want Aardman’s hand-moulded texture imitated inside a computer. Not for you if you expect computer animation to move fluidly; the stiffness here is deliberate.