Flushed Away's dancing slugs

(Source: www.flushedaway.nl)

Wow. How do you screw up the marketing campaign for what promised to be a pretty decent animated movie? Two words: dancing slugs.

DreamWorks Animation, not content with excising every reference to Aardman Studios in its promotion of Flushed Away, has now decided that what this movie needs is a music video of slugs dancing to a 15-year-old dance song, C+C Music Factory's "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)".

Let's run down the problems here. First off, here the slugs bounce around like amphetamine-fueled squirrels, despite the fact that in the movie, they crawl very slowly. There is at least one joke about this in the trailer. Remember that? Yeah, it's that whole continuity thing.

Second, nothing really happens in this clip. You see one slug pretending to be Zelma Davis (or is that Martha Wash?) and another pretending to rap. And the other slugs jump around in the background. No jokes, no references to the movie, nothing.

Originally, I thought Flushed Away was going to be another smart, funny flick from the folks who brought you Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. In other words, this movie was going to stand out from the pack in the Great Animated Glut of 2006. Now I'm starting to wonder if DreamWorks realizes what it has. Or they think they can rehash the "I Like to Move It, Move It" sequence in Madagascar in every single animated film until our brains spill out our ears. This movie deserves better.

You can see the clip here.

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