I think this got panned by the critics. Do you see what I’ve done there? I’ll make it more obvious. Apparently people who watch films and comment on them for a living thought this was toilet. I thought it was great. But what do I know. It was enjoyable. It was entertaining. It was edifying.

Late afternoon on Christmas Day we settled down to watch the DVD. Two Grandparents and three young children were in attendance. My mother always said my humour came straight out of the sewer. This time she wasn’t wrong! I’ve got a fairly high tolerance of ‘toilet’ humour and so I was prepared for some of the grosser gags. I especially enjoyed the ‘floater’  in the sewer that turned out to be a lion bar. That’s about as bad as it gets. There aren’t really any issues of inappropriateness to have to contend with. There’s some racial and social stereotyping but no one’s spared the satirical mockery. You’d have to be pretty sensitive to feel offended.

You can check out lots of comments on the film here, here and here. I especially enjoyed David Master’s threefold summary of the film when in a concluding sentence he argues that the film communicates that

1. character is more important than class [because he learns that even working class sewer rats with no surnames who speak with estuary accents do the right things for the right reasons]
2. relationships are more important than wealth [because he realises how miserable his life was without friends]
3. selfless action is more important than pleasure [because he decides to save the underground world from drowning rather than settling back into his flat]

For my money the second of those is most obvious and easiest to chat to the kids about.

The film’s central character is a pampered pet rat called Roddy St James. Roddy lives as a wealthy self-absorbed bachelor in Kensington. His life goes ‘down the pan’ when he’s ‘flushed away’ by a working class sewer rat called Sid whose appearance has thrown his life into turmoil. The rest of the film concerns Roddy’s attempts to get home. In the course of the film he discovers that home isn’t all he’s made it out to be.

The film begins by depicting the life of luxury from which Roddy is taken. He has everything he would wish for but no one to share it with. By the end of the film he’s realised that it’s better to have good friends than to have great wealth. Home is not where you store your possessions but where you share your life with your friends. And so his lostness has more to do with being isolated from relationships than being unable to get home. By the end he’s happier to be just a first mate on Rita’s boat, ‘the Jammy Dodger’ than to be living alone surrounded by everything that money can buy. If our kids get their heads round that they’ll be one up on many of us.

In Christianity Today, Peter Chattaway comments that the film’s essential message is ‘Community is better than isolation; and being involved in the lives of others, however messy they or their environment might be, is better than living in a world of self serving pleasures’.

If you wanted to strike up a chat with small children these questions might start something useful

• Do you think that Roddy was better of in his posh house with all his things or on the Jammy Dodger with Rita?
• Why do you think Roddy chose to be with Rita?
• Why did Roddy try to stop the Toad?