Flushed Away is a hybrid of the animated feature styles of DreamWorks and Aardman. From that objective statement, your subjective viewpoint of this movie will depend on what you think of both styles. Personally, I'm not too fond of the DreamWorks mold -- the tendency toward hyperactive pacing, the inappropriate ironic postmodern attitudes, and the insistence on formulaic moralizing -- but here it's tempered by Aardman's lighthearted British humor and generally celebratory take on the amusing minutiae of working class day-to-day life.

The result lands me somewhere in the middle -- there's much that's enjoyable about this computer-animated movie, but in the end it feels a bit generic, and in this year's glut of animated films, one really needs something extra to stand out. Without the involvement of Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park and his particular sense of gentle eccentricity, and without the fascination of being able to see those occasional frantic kinetic moments expressed through stop-motion animation, Flushed Away, about a comfortable-living but lonely rat who gets stranded among the rats in a sewer city and chased by jewel thieves, stands to be fun while it lasts, but perhaps too easy to forget later.

While I don't mind Aardman using computers as opposed to plasticine so much because they have a lot of wit to impart and the process is faster than working in stop-motion, I also hope they restrain themselves from having to follow the leads of the American animated story template (it can be argued that one of the best things about Curse of the Were-Rabbit was that it didn't have any kind of overt lesson about family, which has become the number one postive-value fallback of current animated flicks). That said, there's something to savor about a stop-motion feature because you can more easily feel the love and care that went into making it, and perhaps that's what's truly missing here. (Capsule review)

(Released by DreamWorks and rated "PG" for crude humor and some language.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.