Episode 67 - Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006)
Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation.
Chris and Alex return to the feature films of the Bristol-based Aardman Animations studio for Episode 67, travelling from the world of Kensington propriety ‘up top’ to the underground chaos of Ratropolis ‘down below’ for Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006), which tells the story of the trials and tribulations of high society rat Roddy St. James who is inadvertently flushed down into the sewers of London. Mirroring this narrative collision of worlds, Flushed Away also bears the industrial weight of such duality, being part of a 12-year, four-film $250million agreement between Aardman and Hollywood studio DreamWorks Animation to produce a series of animated features. Listen as Chris and Alex examine how Aardman’s stop-frame processes (and signature silicon-based Plasticine style) combined with the workflow of computer-animated films in the U.S.; character modelling and the sculpting of digital clay as part of the Flushed Away’s CG/stop-motion hybrid aesthetics; pantomimic expression and film comedy; questions of national identity and the film’s construction of a ‘national fantastic’; the Romantic origins of fantasy storytelling; and the contribution that Flushed Away’s creativity with waste, junk, garbage and cultural detritus makes to its crafting of a highly-detailed animated world.
Suggested Readings
Bowers, Maggie Ann. 2004. Magic(al) Realism. London: Routledge.
Buchan, Suzanne. 2011. The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Holliday, Christopher. 2018. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Holliday, Christopher. 2020. “Between Plasticine and Pixel: Aardman’s Digital Thumbprint.” In Aardman Animations: Beyond Stop-Motion, edited by Annabelle Honess Roe, 223–240. London: Bloomsbury.
Sergeant, Alex. 2020. “Wallace and Gromit and the British Fantasy Tradition.” In Aardman Animations: Beyond Stop-Motion, edited by Annabelle Honess Roe, 139-152. London: Bloomsbury.
Siebers, Tobin. 1984. The Romantic Fantastic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Wells, Paul. 2012. “‘The sight of 40-year-old genitalia too disgusting, is it?’: Wit, whimsy and wishful thinking in British animation, 1900-present.” In British Comedy Cinema, edited by I.Q. Hunter and Laraine Porter, 196-208. London: Routledge.
Winnicott, D.W. 1971. Playing and Reality. New York. Routledge.