Nevermind, guys. As usual, Eric doesn't let a little thing like FACTS get in the way of a bad gripe...
- Borat never had a sequel. In a way, it was already a sequel, to the earlier TV show. Bruno was another attempt to pull off the same trick, but he was a character already invented before Borat came along.
- As has been said, Flushed Away opened two weeks before Happy Feet, giving DWs more than enough time to find an opening audience (I love how Eric never re-addresses these things when he's found to be wrong, like 99.99% of the time).
- Aardman didn't use CGI "to save time". In fact, they were against the use of CG and were well into prep with this as a traditional stop-motion film. It was only when tests on the water shots proved it would be impossible to animate that amount of water frame by frame that they then looked at stop-motion characters and CG water. When that proved prohibitively
expensive, still not a time issue, they reluctantly took up DWs offer of providing CG animation. Even still, it was a half-and-half job between Glendale and Bristol, which is why the movie was DreamWorks/Aardman labeled, although the project was Aardman initiated. But time never came into it, and Aardman pushed for the CG to be done on twos so that it retained the stop-mo feel.
Eric is right in one part though, that Flushed Away was a very enjoyable movie, and I agree with Bill that it's perhaps Aardman's best, at least structurally. I just think DWs lost faith in it, and may have been looking for an "out " from their deal after Wallace & Gromit surprisingly failed, which was the brand that DWs really got into bed with Aardman in the first place for. Since DWs did not have Aardman rights internationally, if they didn't work in the US, then they wouldn't have been interested seeing that the bottom line rules all...
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