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In a warehouse in Bristol, England, they have toiled away, as their ancestors have done for a hundred years. Painstakingly, perfectly, they build little movie sets and fashion in Plasticine the creatures to live there. They take a photograph of the scene, then move certain figures a micrometer, then take another picture. They do this about a 100,000 times to produce, in four or five years, a feature film like Chicken Run or Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

At Aardman Studios they make art by hand, in a form called stop-motion animation whose history stretches back to the first days of cinema. It certainly goes back to the solitary youths of many Aardmanites. Nick Park, the studio's resident genius, was one of those kids who played with clay in a corner of his Lancashire home until, like Dr. Praetorius in Bride of Frankenstein, he made those little figures come alive.

All that meticulous drudgery pays off in a sparkling finished product. Park and Peter Lord and the hundreds of other genial obsessives over in Bristol have crafted some of the loveliest comic films since Chaplin's. Creature Comforts, Park's day at the zoo with talking animals, and his short films with Wallace the cheese-loving suburban inventor and Gromit his mutely heroic dog, can match any animated films of the past 20 years. But the process cannot be delightful. Most American animators would say it's daft, all that precision—toying with clay, when, these days, computers can do so much of the work for you.

That notion must have drifted over to Bristol. After two features and dozen of shorts whose wit and grace proved that stop-motion deserved to survive in the digital era, some of the Aardmanites agreed to go to California and make a computer-generated feature with the company's American partner, DreamWorks. (Not Park; he stayed home.)

Could Aardman go to Hollywood without going Hollywood? The answer comes in Flushed Away, supervised by Lord and directed by David Bowers and Sam Fell. It's an entertaining comedy that vibrates with two kinds of tension: of antique artisans working in a new medium, and of English artists collaborating and colliding with American showmanship.

The movie's reluctant hero, Roddy (voiced by Hugh Jackman), is a pampered, upper-class-English pet mouse. Kept in a literally gilded cage by a nice family in Kensington, Roddy has impeccable manners and a chipper demeanor that can't quite mask his loneliness. So when he's flushed down a toilet into the London sewer system, and discovers a complex underworld underground, he is at first horrified, then thrilled to join a plucky rodent named Rita (Kate Winslet) in her comrades' battle against the pompous toad king (Ian McKellen). This, Roddy realizes, is the bustle and agitation he's been missing—the agita and ecstasy of life.

Flushed Away wants to convince you that the threat of tadpoles plaguing London is somehow more horrifying than the actual pestilence of rats every large city suffers from. But it's a fantasy—with attitude. Toad is, if not a racist, a species-ist; after some rats bungle an assignment, he complains, "I should never have had rodents do an amphibian's job." It has fun at the expense of Germans and especially the French, who are portrayed as cowardly and snobbish. ("You find my pain funny?" asks Toad of a French creature called Le Frog, voiced by Jean Reno. Le Frog replies, "I find everyone's pain funny but my own. I'm French.") Naturellement, the movie is awash in rodent jokes, from an amusing libel on the Pied Piper to the crucial moment when Roddy implores Rita to "Nibble for your life!"

But the main mouse here is the one attached to a computers. The design of the underworld is pretty splendid, with an imaginative scope and attention to detail that might have taken decades to realize if each piece had to be constructed and painted, rather than simply texted and input. You certainly won't see thumbprints on the characters, as were occasionally visible in the fingers-on-clay movies. This one is as polished as a formica table top in the kitchen of a neat-freak housewife. The question is whether the Aardmen lost some of stop-motion's charm, its humanity, when they went digital.

I'm just guessing that the kids from Bristol felt a little stranded in California. But that feeling is in the movie, which is about the hero's displacement when he's thrown into a strange milieu, and his desperate need to find a sense of community in the new Oz. In Chicken Run, the outsider was a brash American rooster who crash-landed in an English hen house. In Flushed Away, the English hero is dumped into a land where the natives scheme, shout and betray, In a word: Hollywood.

When Aardman made Chicken Run, its first film sponsored by DreamWorks, Park and Lord talked about the visits Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks' animation chief, made to Bristol. Katzenberg would make his points, at an American force and volume, then Park and Lord would nod politely and continue doing what they wanted. Katzenberg basically bought the right to be ignored graciously.

This time, it appears, Katzenberg was in charge. The movie's pulse races, compared to the tempo of Chicken Run. The film teems with pop-cultural allusions, referencing Finding Nemo (a small fish asking "Have you seen my dad?") and Monty Python & the Holy Grail (a mosquito that finds itself on Toad's tongue and shouts, "Run away!"). Roddy's groin takes quite a pummeling; that's less Wallace and Gromit than Larry, Curly and Moe. The script, like those of many a DreamWorks animated movie, seems assembled from a brainstorming super-session, in which bright guys spit out funny gags, and every one of them gets into the movie. With a barrage of these jabs, Flushed Away works you over and wears you down, until you surrender to giggles or get defiant and shut out the noise.

The result is both slick and coarse—fine entertainment, as I say, but deficient in the comedy of reticence discouragement that is Aardman's (or maybe just Nick Park's) unique strength. I don't want to say the Englishmen were corrupted, but I think they allowed their strongest, quirkiest instincts to be tethered. The American movie industry is like that, and foreigners will have their hearts broken if they think they'll get bigger budgets and cooler tools without having to pay in some way for them.

None of this is to say that stop-motion animation is inherently noble, or that computer cartoons can't bear the imprint of one creator—can't have soul. It's in a way a matter of corporate identity for a hand-made film studio. Should Aardman go fully into 3-D? For stop-motion specialists, is CGI a hare-brained scheme, like the ones Wallace is always hatching, needing Gromit to extricate him? Or does it represent the inevitable next step? Once the Aardmen have made a film with computer, can they return to the old ways? Go back home? How're ya gonna keep 'em playing with clay after they've gone 3-D? And how many consecutive rhetorical questions can I pose?

It could be that I'm no less a traditionalist than the dear eccentrics in Curse of the Were-Rabbit, determined to celebrate their vegetable festival as they've done for 500 years. Aardman is a business, and with Were-Rabbit earning only half the box office cash of Chicken Run, DreamWorks will want to protect its investment; Park and Lord will have to listen more attentively to Katzenberg. (He is unlikely, for example, to approve another Wallace and Gromit feature after the first one tanked.)

There's one other traditionalist at Aardman: Nick Park. He hasn't gone 3-D, or Hollywood. And if his subordinates remain dazzled by the facility of CGI, Park may be back in his basement, making his sad and beautiful creatures come to life all on his own.

• RICHARD CORLISS
• With Flushed Away, Britain's foremost stop-motion animation unit goes digital in Hollywood