Galline in fuga

Hailing from the animation house that brought us such jems as Morph, the Wallace and Gromit series and Rex the Runt, Chicken Run is the first ever feature length claymation ever attempted.

Set on a chicken farm in Yorkshire some time in the middle of the century, our plucky (sorry) heroines face a lifetime of hard labor laying for the farmers, and if their performance is not up to par they quite literally face the chop. Ginger, making her way to the top of the pecking order (sorry again) attempts jailbreak after farcical jailbreak, but success is less than forthcoming.

Enter Rocky The Rhode Island Red, (Rocky Rhodes for short, and you can't blame me for that one, the writers came up with it) apparently able to fly, the chickens look to him to help them bust this chicken coup, but Rocky is not what he may appear to be.

That's the plot in a nut (egg?) shell, and as you can imagine the subject matter made for perfect "salutes" to the classic world war 2 escape movies, references to which abound throughout. From Ginger tossing a baseball (actually a sprout) in the "cooler" (coal bunker), to Fowler's incessant ramblings about his old RAF days.

The lead characters are deep and endearing enough for you to care about what happens to them, if a little stereotypical at times. The interaction between them is fluid and believable, all the more amazing considering that Mel Gibson never even set foot in the same recording studio as the other actors, reading his lines in a studio in America instead. The supporting cast provide plenty of humour and Mrs. Tweedy substitutes quite nicely for the Nazi camp commandant.

The animation is lively and colourful the characters wonderfully expressive in that unmistakable style developed in the Wallace and Gromit shorts, and thanks to the fact the sets are real models there is plenty of scope for dramatic lighting effects.

The only real fault I could find in the film was that it just seemed a little too... American at times. Hollywood's involvement showed through the English setting to some degree, especially as you get to the movie's climax which seems to go a bit overboard, especially compared to the utterly hysterical ending to The Wrong Trousers. But all in all I have to say I really enjoyed this movie. Now all we need is a Wallace and Gromit movie.

The great animation director Chuck Jones has often stated that his cartoons "weren't made for children. Neither were they made for adults. They were made for me." Jones's seven-minute shorts were made on a far lower budget than the animated features of today. With features, much more money is at stake, as well as the livelihoods of more people. Because of the pressure to make back the investment, animated features can give an impression of being created by committee, as though tailored to fit some committee's idea of a prefabricated audience segment. It's remarkable, then, that Aardman Animation's "Chicken Run" shows off so much personality, the mark of a film made not for an imagined mass audience, but because it satisfied some need for the filmmakers-besides the need to put food on the table, that is.

The story revolves around an English egg farm designed a lot like a WWII-era prison camp, with overtones of the Nazi concentration camps as well, in that chickens that don't produce end up as dinner. While most of the chickens are resigned to their fate, one plucky hen named Ginger keeps leading escape attempts and keeps getting locked in "solitary" for her pains. Her task takes on new urgency when the Tweedys (the couple who run the farm) prepare to convert their operation into a chicken-pie factory. Hope arrives in the form of an American known (amusingly, in view of the recent "Rocky & Bullwinkle" film) as "Rocky the Flying Rooster", whom Ginger thinks can teach the chickens how to fly. Naturally, Rocky isn't really what he seems to be, and the revelation of his secret threatens to dash all hope of escape, because everyone knows chickens can't fly-or can they?

Unlike most cartoon films, "Chicken Run" is animated using clay figures in stop-motion. While this process involves much more labor than drawn animation, it also makes easier the use of many of the tools of live-action filmmaking, such as dramatic lighting and moving camera work. Directors Peter Lord and Nick Park both have considerable experience in this field, Park with "Creature Comforts" and the "Wallace & Gromit" series (perhaps the most popular animated shorts of the 1990's) and Lord as a co-founder (with David Sproxton) of Aardman and director of such shorts as "Adam", "Wat's Pig", and "Early Bird".

The look of "Chicken Run" displays a harmonious blending of Park's and Lord's strengths; the character designs have the cartoony look of Park's work, while the more realistic settings and backdrops (which appear subject to grime and weathering) are typical of those in Lord's films. All the major characters are distinctive and believable on their own terms; even the numerous chickens have their own distinct looks and voices. The only times the illusion of believability fails are when a clay chicken collides with a metal fence; I half expect to see the clay figure sliced up on the way through. (This may be a personal reaction, conditioned by years of exposure to "Tom & Jerry" and "Roadrunner/Coyote" cartoons.) The story moves efficiently and contains much humor and detail that reward close attention, as well as bravura set-pieces such as Rocky and Ginger's dramatic encounter with the Tweedys' pie machine.

While it has justifiably been compared with military prison-camp escape movies such as "Stalag 17" and "The Great Escape", as well as with the revisionist farm-animal melodrama "Babe", the movie "Chicken Run" resembles most is Pixar's computer-animated "A Bug's Life". The resemblence lies partly in certain details of plot (such as the hero[es] who isn't/aren't what he/they seem to be) but mostly in the nature of the story itself. While human prisoners have a life before prison upon which to look back upon, the chickens in this movie have never known such freedom. Thus, when Ginger talks of escape, she not only urges them to change their location but their entire way of thinking. In chicken terms, this is a radical message, the same one put forth by all the great human radical organizers: that those who are exploited have a right to expect a better life. Though the species and the methods of exploitation are different, "A Bug's Life" shares this revolutionary message (with Flik playing the radical visionary part). Both movies also stress the importance of banding together against oppressors whose power turns out to be more apparent than real.

While one could quibble about such commonalities, I'm impressed that two such films exist at all, that they were funded by major Hollywood studios (Disney for "A Bug's Life", Dreamworks for "Chicken Run"), and that kids love them and parents don't mind watching them more than once. One wonders if the parents know exactly what it is they're watching, and letting their kids watch. Then again, maybe they, too, believe they and their children deserve better lives, and enjoy seeing fellow victims of exploitation get such a life in the end.

As an older gentleman with a rather refined taste in flim viewing, I was surprised by how absorbed I got in this elaborate cartoon-like feature. It's no mean trick to create rubber characters that you can really care about. My favorites were Mr & Mrs Tweedy -- especially the latter. Mrs Tweedy was the personification of evil (within the confines of a cartoon of course) and just a thoroughly interesting character. The sets were well done, especially the Stalag 17 camp image (notice the 17 on the meeting hut). Lots of British stereotype stuff which worked pretty well and kept my attention. Fast paced without becoming just another Roger Rabbit.

Recommended!

Disney and Pixar held such a firm grip on animation that somehow our expectations seem to have been conditioned by their standards. This is why enjoying a Hayao Miyazaki film or anything outside the 'Dream Factory' is capital to prevent a certain creative monopoly... for the sake of creativity itself. And to call "Chicken Run" creative is an understatement.

I have never been into claymation or stop-motion, "Wallace and Gromit" are household names but I'm not sure I ever watched any of their cartoons, but I admire the legacy, the patience with which Nick Park and Peter Lord gave life to these characters with unmistakable ovoid smile. They made their own style like Parker and Stone did with "South Park", animation starts with style, guts, a touch of zaniness and... a good story. Park and Lord designed it, Karey Kirkpatrick wrote the screenplay.

In 1995, having made names of themselves with two Oscars for Best Animated Shorts, the duo figured it was time to join the big league. After four years, was released "Chicken Run", a tale of chicken trying to escape from a big farm designed like a German POW camp with undertones that recall the darkest chapters of history. That the film maintain a jolly and goofy attitude is admirable because never the gags (and there are plenty of them) conceal what's in jeopardy here; not just freedom but survival.

In what might be the film's most disturbing scene, hens are aligned in the manner of prisoners waiting for the Kommandantur officer to give his orders and then a tall and thin woman almost goose-stepping with long and ominous black boots, checks her notebook and finds that one of her hens hasn't laid eggs in five days. There's a strange contrast between the poor hen's cartoonish gulp and the following scene where Mrs. Tweedy (voiced by Miranda Richardson) becomes the executioner.

That scene doesn't set the tone as much as the stakes. The opening credits treated the heroine's failing escape attempts as a 'running gag' (no pun intended) ending with her being thrown in solitary (a funny nod to "The Great Escape" shows her playing with a Brussels sprout like Steve McQueen's baseball) but when the poor hen is killed off-screen -we do hear the thud and we see the raising axe- we understand that it's a matter of life and death and these hens' lives hang on their capability to lay eggs, in fact, on economical viability to the money-driven owner.

Later she'd rent a new machine designed to make automated pies to increase her profits and so eggs will lose their life values. I guess one who had visited a farm or these industrial complexes where animals are mechanically stuffed and killed, won't find the historical parallels too far-fetched. Park and Lord humanized the hens and gave each one distinct personalities. It's perhaps the one concession to formula that had to be made, but it works. You know you have a leader, a brainiac, a reluctant one and a goofball in a community, but to call these hens archetypal would really diminish the effort pulled in the writing. At the very least they're war film archetypes not cute animated characters.

Ginger (Julia Sawalha) is the intrepid leader and the embodiment of "getting free or die trying", she's the voice of reason and her heroism leaves no doubt since her failing escapes are collective, if it was up to her, she would have been free already. She is supported by Mac, the scientific one (and ever since I watched that "What's My Line" episode, I know chicken can wear glasses), there's the most productive one Bunty (Imelda Stanton) whose skepticism is never overplayed, I actually loved her retort to Ginger's , "what haven't we tried before?" "we haven't tried not trying to escape" and there's Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow), an elderly rooster who keeps rambling about his experience at the RAF and youth's lack of discipline. And there's Babs (Jane Horrocks), the dim-witted champion knitter, one of these you can't help thinking 'God I wish nothing happens to her".

It's interesting that the film is mostly an all-female cast where even the villain 'Mrs Tweedy" illustrates a sort of female power by being so dominant on her hen-pecked (literally) husband Mr Tweedy (Tony Haygart). Female characters are so prevalent that there had to be a reverse 'Smurfette effect', besides the two helpful rats (Phil Daniels and Timothy Spall). There's where the cocky (literally) Rocky Rhodes (Mel Gibson), a rooster with flying powers (so it seems) crashes into the farm. One can imagine how a rooster would feel surrounded by so many groupies, but Ginger has no time for courting, she offers him a shelter in exchange of flying lessons. It's not much the training session or Rocky's morale-boosting actions but his hidden flaws that make him such an endearing character. In a funny coincidence, the same year Gibson played a similar role in "What Women Want". Rocky knows what hens want but will he live up to his premise?

As the plot advances, we understand that heroism is a dish often served with a share of bluff and the two roosters in fact have their shameful secrets. "Chicken Run" never runs out of ideas and gratifies us with great moments: a dancing party, hens trying to hide from Mr. Tweedy, and a spectacular climax. One of the film's greatest momentums is the trip inside the infernal pie-making contraption with some clever nods to Indiana Jones. And just imagine that the creators made four seconds of the film each day, just as if the hens dug a tunnel with toothpicks.

It's a credit to the authors to have made a film with such dark undertones so fun. It is mature but never at the expenses of entertainment. And hens are so believable as characters that we cheer for them not because we're required so but because we want to.

This movie is all you could hope for in summer film fare. It had action, suspense, romance and a large helping of comedy. I was predisposed to love the movie, being a great fan of Wallace and Gromit, and the movie lived up to those other award-winning works. The movie works on every level, and was fun for all ages viewing it. Even my husband, who disdains children's movies, was truly enjoying himself. Needless to say, the children loved it, despite one rather gruesome off-screen moment, but that seemed not to matter too much. All in all, I can't recommend this movie too highly, it was incredibly entertaining and well-done.