Production
The film's original concept involved pirates, and was pitched to DreamWorks soon after the release of Chicken Run in 2000. However, Aardman were told that there was no market for pirate films (this was before Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was released to great success in 2003), and were told to modernise the concept. By the time the rewrite was done, the project had to be postponed to make way for the production of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit; it was finally released after not only the original Pirates of the Caribbean, but also its first sequel.
The film's working title was Ratropolis, but it was changed due to its similarity to Disney-Pixar's Ratatouille. In Spain, the movie was released as Ratónpolis (ratón is Spanish for "mouse"). The Latin-American title for the film was Lo que el agua se llevó ("Gone with the Water"), a pun on Gone with the Wind.
Traditionally, Aardman have used stop-motion for their animated features, but it is very complex to render water with this technique, and using real water can damage plasticine models. It would have been very expensive to composite CGI into shots that include water, of which there are many in the movie, so they chose to make Flushed Away their first all-CGI production. The characters still resemble Aardman's classic characters, as the designs were taken straight from the original plasticine models. Several techniques were employed to give the impression of stop-motion animation, such as using replacement mouths for lip-synch rather than the interpolation typically seen in computer animation.
The film underwent many changes and versions, resulting in an inflated budget. For example, Roddy originally had two hamster manservants named Gilbert and Sullivan that were featured heavily in early trailers.
This is the second of two Aardman-produced films released by DreamWorks. Aardman's experience with DreamWorks during the making of the film led to a split between the two studios.
Read more about this topic: Flushed Away
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