Peter Lord recalls the pitch for Flushed Away was simple: The African Queen with the gender roles reversed. All images © 2006 DreamWorks Animation Llc. and Aardman Animations Ltd. Flushed Away TM DreamWorks Animation Llc.

During the production of Aardman Animation’s Chicken Run (2000), the idea for a feature involving “rats in love, in a sewer” came to light from animator Sam Fell. Fell had previously worked as stop-frame animator on Peter Lord’s directorial short, Wat’s Pig (1996), so he knew the Aardman co-founder well.

“Everyone at Aardman was encouraged to come up with ideas for features for the DreamWorks partnership,” says Lord. “We liked Sam’s idea and he, myself and [development executive] Mike Cooper developed it into a storyline before pitching to DreamWorks. The trick was to find a project both company’s liked — and this one fit the bill.

"The pitch was simple: ‘The African Queen with the gender roles reversed,’ according to Lord. "We swapped the spanner-wielding, oily rag working class character which Humphrey Bogart played to a female and made Katherine Hepburn’s very proper, out-of-her-depth, gentrified lady into an upper-crust male character.”

Classic British comic writing duo Ian Clement and Dick La Frenais (The Commitments, Goal!) were assigned to the script, which was originally planned as a stop-motion feature to follow Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Peter Lord had qualms about moving Aardman toward CG, as well as switching production from Bristol to DreamWorks’ Glendale, California, studio.

“Then, for one reason and another, Curse got later and later, delayed a year from its original release date while Flushed Away got ever more ambitious,” says Lord.

Creating the Ratropolis
It soon became clear that animating rats meant designing unfeasibly large sets to create an underground Ratropolis — the film’s working title. “The Wallace model stands 10 inches (24.5cm) high — any bigger and it would be too cumbersome and any smaller and you’d lose detail,” Lord explains. “If Wallace walks through a doorway we can build the door 12 inches (30.5 cm) high. But if we take the scale of a rat and make the rats 10 nches high and everything in the real world proportionate to that, you realize you’d have to build 30-foot (9.14 meters) high structures. Everything becomes proportionately much larger. It which would push the budget up and require more studio space.

“The final issue was recreating the water environment. Fluids are notoriously difficult to reproduce in stop-frame. We discussed long and hard about the various permutations and spent an interim period exploring a mix of CG backgrounds and set-extensions with stop-motion foregrounds, but we finally realized that CG was the right route for this project.”

The decision was certainly not a question of cost, he declares. “Flushed Away is way more expensive than any previous feature we’ve done.”

The final issue that had be decided before Aardman could commit to CG was how to recreate the water environment. Fluids are notoriously difficult to reproduce in stop-frame.

At that point — in 2002 — the characters had been designed; the first half of the script nailed down and storyboarded. “I had qualms about moving to CG,” he admits as production switched from Bristol to DreamWorks’ Glendale, California, studio.

“I guess we were quite arrogant in saying ‘We don’t want any of your questionable CG tricks here.’ We wanted to do it our way and to steer the DreamWorks crew to work in our style.

“DreamWorks wanted us to do that too. The Aardman trademark look and feel is a style we are famous for and it’s also a selling point. But it was also a challenge to us and them to create a digital animation style, which didn’t resemble other CG films. Our style shows the edges, it’s deliberately not silky smooth. We could have made the fur ‘furry’ and the environments slick, but we don’t want everything to look beautifully rendered and lit. Our priority is achieving a good acting performance from the characters and not to get the characters to gesticulate excessively which they do in a lot of CG.”