"Flushed Away" is enough to make any hopped-up multitasking preteen long for a nice glass of milk and a copy of "Good Dog, Carl." After the fourth electrocution gag, the 10th smack in the face and the 12th assault on a wee rodent crotch, we could all use something quiet.

This chaotic animated feature proves two things. One: Singing slugs can save a picture, or nearly. Every time the slug chorus overreacts to the hero or breaks into a number, "Flushed Away" suddenly improves. Two: If you take the Aardman Features' animated style, familiar in its contours (and its characters' massive teeth) from the Wallace & Gromit adventures, then run everything through the depersonalizer known as uninspired computer animation, you come out with a forgettable DreamWorks/Aardman co-production.

Storytelling clarity and a protagonist of some interest are lacking here, despite five screenwriters and seven more contributors of "additional material." In the posh Kensington district of London, domesticated, pampered Roddy the mouse (voiced by Hugh Jackman) is visited by a sewer rat who ends up flushing Roddy down the toilet into an underground sewer lair, modeled on London itself, populated by rodents and amphibians. There Roddy meets Rita (Kate Winslet), a rat with her own boat and a boatload of attitude.

When they're not at each other's tiny rodent throats, Rita and Roddy team up to vanquish Toad (Ian McKellan) and his dastardly plan to rid the underworld of its rodent population. Mainly the film is a chase interrupted by arguments and reminders, by way of exceedingly frantic cutting and restless, overcrowded compositions, that "Flushed Away" is also a video game. As Roddy and Rita shoot the sewer rapids and dispatch their froggy assailants, you think, well, it might be fun to play the game sometime … but in the meantime here's this movie that doesn't do much to make you care much about the characters, even with Jackman and Winslet voicing them.

Given the Aardman pedigree, it's rather remarkable that "Flushed Away" ends up in the quality range of a standard-issue CG job as "Over the Hedge." These movies need to look like something, and they need decent verbal jokes. And not to sound like Old Man Darling in "Peter Pan," but please: a little less noise there.