Flushed Away (2006)

A pet rat named Roddy lives a life of Kensington luxury until a sewer rat named Sid flushes him down the toilet, which is the sort of premise Aardman Animations could once sell on charm alone. The resulting journey through Ratropolis, a city assembled from discarded human junk, is brisk, inventive, and entirely uninterested in instructing anyone about anything. Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet supply voices. Ian McKellen supplies a toad with a grudge about his years as Prince Charles's favorite pet. The film moves.

The cultural inventory here is remarkably bare, and this is not a complaint so much as an observation. Rita Malone is resourceful, competent, and captain of her own vessel, but her capability is a standard trait of adventure storytelling, and the film never frames it as an argument about anything. The Toad is a pompous aristocrat who despises rodents, yet his snobbery exists to generate jokes about porcelain memorabilia, not to indict a class structure. The sewer society's tensions read as species conflict and comic hierarchy, played for slapstick. There is no romance outside the conventional pairing, no engagement with identity, no environmental parable tucked into the floodgate scheme, and no moment where the film pauses to explain how we ought to live.

What remains is craft. The screenplay, credited to five writers, keeps the gags coming and the sentiment modest. The film's own publicity described it as The African Queen with the gender roles reversed, which is a pitch, not a thesis. It lost a great deal of money, ended a fruitful partnership between two studios, and has since settled into the comfortable category of animated diversion that asks nothing of its audience beyond attention. An empty ledger. Rare, in this climate, and almost restful.