Flushed Away (U)

Aardman have swapped Plasticene for pixels to make their first computer-animated cartoon, but don't worry: it's still got all the fun, the English eccentricity and the head-spinning Heath-Robinson detail of the Wallace and Gromit films. It even looks familiar. The digital animation does an uncanny job of replicating claymation's textures, and the hero has Wallace's goggling eyes and toothy grin.

That hero is Roddy, a pampered pet rat who has the run of a Kensington townhouse. Then his life goes down the toilet, and so does he, and he washes up in the sewers underneath London, where his fellow rats have built a mini-metropolis. It's a place where sandwich boards are made of real bread, and incidental music is provided by whistling slugs. Soon, Roddy is caught up in a battle between a feisty rat-ette, voiced by Kate Winslet, and a toad (Ian McKellen) with a dastardly scheme.

Flushed Away is the best cartoon since, well, Wallace and Gromit. The action is a whirling delight, and the script, co-written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, packs in so many puns and visual gags that every joke has one more punchline then you're expecting. My only quibble is the voice-casting of Hugh Jackman as Roddy. After the débâcle of A Good Year, Australians should be banned from using upper-class English accents for quite some time.

n.barber@independent.co.uk