CANNES: News on ‘Flushed Away’
May 12, 2005
Source: Dreamworks
Posted by: Paul Heath
With all the hoo-ha going on down in Cannes yesterday for WALLACE AND GROMIT - THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT, we didn’t get the time to post this release from Dreamworks about their next film, FLUSHED AWAY, which stars the voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate WInslet, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis, Simon Callow and our own Shane Ritchie. Here’s the Dreamwork release from Cannes.
CANNES: From DreamWorks Animation and Aardman comes the computer-animated comedy “Flushed Away,” starring the voices of Hugh Jackman (the “X-Men” franchise, Broadway’s “The Boy From Oz”), and four-time Oscar® nominee Kate Winslet (”Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Iris,” “Titanic,” “Sense and Sensibility”).
Rounding out the main cast of “Flushed Away” are two-time Oscar® nominee Ian McKellen (”The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” “Gods and Monsters”), Andy Serkis (”The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”), Bill Nighy (”Shaun of the Dead,” “Love Actually”), Shane Richie (”Shoreditch”), Geoffrey Palmer (2003’s “Peter Pan”) and Simon Callow (”The Phantom of the Opera”).
Set on and beneath the streets of London, “Flushed Away” is the story of Roddy (Hugh Jackman), an upper-crust “society rat,” who is rather rudely evicted from his Kensington flat when he is flushed down into Ratropolis, the bustling sewer world found under London’s streets. There, he meets Rita (Kate Winslet), an enterprising scavenger who works the sewers in her faithful boat, the Jammy Dodger. Together they must navigate their way through a busy city filled with dangers for any rat, including terrifying rapids, treacherous whirlpools and, most of all, the villainous Toad (Ian McKellen) and his hench-rats Spike and Whitey (Andy Serkis and Bill Nighy). Though completely out of his element at first, the privileged Roddy finds himself an unlikely hero when he learns that Ratropolis is in danger from the world above.
The computer-animated comedy marks two firsts for the multiple Oscar®-winning team at Aardman: While the studio will continue to produce their trademark clay animated films, this is their first computer-animated feature film and is the first film under their banner not to be entirely produced at their studios in Bristol, England. The creative team is split between Bristol and DreamWorks Animation’s Glendale campus, while the computer animation will be accomplished entirely in Glendale.
The film is being directed by Aardman’s Sam Fell and David Bowers, and produced by Peter Lord, David Sproxton and Cecil Kramer.
The film will be released in November 2006.
Source: Hollywood News
DreamWorks, Aardman getting ‘Crood’ with Cleese
Friday, May 13, 2005
By Anne Thompson
CANNES (Hollywood Reporter) - DreamWorks Animation SKG is partnering with Aardman Animations, the British firm behind the claymation franchise “Wallace & Gromit,” on a prehistoric comedy written by ex-Monty Python regular John Cleese.
“Crood Awakening” is targeted for a 2008 release, the companies said Thursday. They first joined forces on the 2000 feature “Chicken Run,” which grossed $230 million worldwide.
DreamWorks animation czar Jeffrey Katzenberg said he asked Cleese (who voiced a character in “Shrek 2″) to pen the new film from an original story by Aardman co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who will be executive producers.
“The Croods are sensationally unevolved,” Lord said. “They haven’t got fire or the wheel. But they learn how to tell jokes.”
DreamWorks and Aardman also previewed the stop-motion animated comedy, “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” which will be released stateside Oct. 7. In the film, Wallace and Gromit run a new business, Anti-Pesto, a humane pest control unit hired to catch rabbits by Wallace’s new romantic interest, the super-posh Lady Tottingham, voiced by Helena Bonham Carter.
The Aardman crew showed early artwork from their first computer-animated feature, “Flushed Away,” which is to be released in November 2006 and is being produced by Lord and Paxton and a small crew with help from DreamWorks Animation. The film is about a high-society rat (Hugh Jackman) who gets flushed down the sewer into the grimy city below. There he meets the lovely scavenger Rita (Kate Winslet).
“We’re an animation company, and we’re aware that we do stop-frame animation better than anyone else in the world,” Lord said. “We have no intention of giving that up because it’s what we do best. ‘Flushed Away’ started as stop-frame, but we realized that it wasn’t going to work. CG has been quite liberating.”
Source: Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
Wallace & Gromit Do Cannes in Preview
By DAVID GERMAIN, AP Movie Writer
CANNES, France - The latest stars of the Cannes Film Festival have feet literally made of clay. The cheese-obsessed Brit and his crafty canine companion of the “Wallace & Gromit” TV films turned up in a preview of their first big-screen clay-animated adventure.
From DreamWorks and Aardman Animations, the outfits behind the hit “Chicken Run,” “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” makes its debut in U.S. theaters Oct. 7.
Though the “Wallace & Gromit” shorts debuted in the early 1990s, had won
Academy Awards for short animation and had a devoted following, Aardman opted to do a comic take on “The Great Escape,” only with chickens, as its first theatrical film.
“I think we didn’t really have a `Wallace & Gromit’ idea that was really good enough at the time to make a full-length feature,” said Nick Park, creator of “Wallace & Gromit” and co-director of the movie version and of “Chicken Run.” “As it was our first kind of foray into feature filmmaking, we needed a fresh idea, and we had this great idea about chickens.”
Considering the three “Wallace & Gromit” movie sequences screened for reporters at Cannes, Aardman now has what seems like a sparkling idea for its “Wallace & Gromit” movie: Can-do human Wallace and his right-hand dog Gromit have started a pest-control outfit called Anti-Pesto.
They rely on their trademark gadgets to remove burrowing creatures from British lawns and gardens. One is an underground suction system that vacuums rabbits harmlessly into a giant holding tank.
But just as the neighborhood prepares for its annual giant vegetable competition, a monster rabbit begins a rampage on the townsfolks’ gardens, forcing Wallace and Gromit to take extreme measures to catch the creature.
Peter Sallis, the key mouthpiece in the TV films, returns as the voice of Wallace. The movie also features Helena Bonham Carter providing the voice of Wallace’s new love interest and Ralph Fiennes doing the voice of her pompous suitor.
DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said he had been interested in working with Aardman as early as his days with Disney in the early 1990s, when he was helping to revive the studio’s animation business.
“They’re really smart, they’ve got irony and satire and parody, and I love the thoughtfulness that they put into the work they’re doing,” Katzenberg said. “I think it’s a unique style that they’ve perfected now, and it’s just amazingly appealing.”
The movie comes amid a resurgence of interest in one of the oldest forms of film animation, the stop-motion method in which still objects are captured one shot at a time then moved infinitesimally frame after frame. Projected at full speed, the objects seem to have a life of their own as they move around.
Aardman, the company behind the dazzling animation for Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” music video in 1986, also has created a stop-motion TV series based on its Oscar-winning short “Creature Comforts.”
And preceding the “Wallace & Gromit” movie in theaters this fall will be “Corpse Bride,” a return to stop-motion animation by Tim Burton (”The Nightmare Before Christmas”). “Corpse Bride” features the voices of Johnny Depp and Bonham Carter.
At Cannes, Aardman and DreamWorks also showed footage from their first computer-animated collaboration, “Flushed Away,” featuring the voices of Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet in the tale of a rodent flushed down the drain from his upper-class digs and forced to adapt to life among the sewer rats. Due out in 2006, the movie is being made through a digital process that simulates the look of stop-motion, Katzenberg said.
Aardman also announced its next project, the prehistoric culture-clash comedy “Crood Awakening,” written by John Cleese. That movie also will be produced through some form of stop-motion animation.
“There seems to be a kind of renaissance that’s happening now,” Park said. “With Tim Burton’s film and `Creature Comforts’ and now `Wallace & Gromit,’ there are probably more people employed in the world now in stop-frame animation than ever before, so it seems to be rising in popularity.”
Source: AP
Posted by: Ruth
Posted in: News > Flushed Away
