Chicken Run (2000) – Review

By the time 2000 rolled along, Aardman Animations were already providing iconic magic with skillfully manipulated plasticine thanks to the Oscar winning efforts of Wallace & Gromit and the spellbinding Creature Comforts skits. However, after years of conquering the realm of the short film, it was eventually time for Nick Park, Peter Lord and a virtual army of obscenely patient animators to put on their big boy pants and finally bang out a feature length movie.
The obvious choice would have been to simply bring their headlining characters, Wallace & Gromit, to the big screen, but seeing as stop motion animators have dedicated their entire lives to doing things the hard way, Aardman decided that for their first feature there was only one way to go… chickens.
While that decision may have raised some eyebrows (possibly being moved at one frame at a time), it resulted in possibly one of the most inventive animated movies ever put together while giving the world something its never seen before. A prisoner of war movie for children.

Life on Mr & Mrs Tweedy’s chicken farm is hardly a bed of roses. Not only is the muddy, gloomy place structured suspiciously like a prisoner of war camp, but if the chickens contained within don’t produce their required quota of eggs, the unscrupulous Mrs Tweedy takes them away for the literal chop. What also isn’t helping is that the farm is scraping out miniscule profits and if something doesn’t change soon, every chicken in the place may soon find their neck on the line.
Sensing that things are starting to get hairy, plucky hen, Ginger, has made it her sole goal in life to not only escape, but get each and every chicken in the camp, including ditzy Babs, boisterous Bunty, inventive Mac and aging, blistering rooster, Fowler, outside to freedom.
But while Ginger has been repeatedly thwarted thanks to Mr Tweedy and his dogs, salvation arrives in the form of Rocky, an American rooster who literally flies in one day as he soars over the fence. Hiding the injured visitor, the hens are convinced that they’ve finally cracked their way out and Ginger believes that if Rocky can teach them all the secret of flying, their escape will be a cinch. But while the charismatic rooster claims that won’t be a problem, there’s something he’s not telling that could prove to be disastrous, especially when it’s revealed that Mrs Tweedy has decided to move from the egg farming business to the chicken pie making business.
With time fast running out and Rocky’s flying lessons going nowhere, it seems that all the chickens are destined to end up entombed in pastry and buried in gravy, but when Ginger suggests one last, desperate plan, these birds of a feather will have to flock together if they’re going to escape to the promised land with their giblets intact.

So I’m not even going to dance around the subject of how much I utterly adore this movie and go straight in for the kill with a very simple story: I actually worked in a cinema when Chicken Run was released and therefore was required to see it an extremely unhealthy amount of times. However despite easly racking up views in double digits in under a week, there’s wasn’t a single time when I wasn’t completely and totally enraptured in this entire world from top to bottom and it’s a true testament to the keen minds behind it that it still genuinely brings joy-tears to my eyes even today.
The joke is, of course, that the film is essentially The Great Escape, but with anthropomorphised chickens trying to bust out of a bizarrely facist looking chicken farm before the stern faced leader has them all killed. The parallels are absolutely stunning – especially for a kids film – and even though the majority of them will zoom over the head of your average ankle biter, it’s something of a delicious feast for the more cinema savvy. I’m not entirely sure how you get a gaunt farner’s wife walking in wellingtons to effortlessly emulate a stern Nazi commandant, or reenact the iconic sight of Steve McQueen’s Cooler King bouncing a baseball off a wall in solitary confinement with a chicken and a brussels sprout, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg for sheer amount of references included, which also includes Star Wars, Indiana Jones and a whole raft of others.

However, it takes more than crackshot homage to make a masterpiece, and Nick Park and Peter Lord not only manage to recreate the stunningly charming, ludicrously British feel of Wallace & Gromit with more chicken/egg/bird puns than is strictly healthy (Rocky refers to himself as the Lone Free Ranger; devious rats Nick and Fletcher discuss the chicken and the egg conundrum and at one point the determined Ginger is labeled Attila The Hen), but they also realise that if you include some actual danger, it makes everything far more exciting. Yes, the moment when one of the chickens is carried off to be slaughtered may get a few bottom lips quivering from the younger audience, but it raises the stakes to the point where you have so much invested in the balls-out finale, it pulls off that incredibly rare Toy Story 3 trick of convincing you that good guys could actually die.
The voice cast is equally eccentric with homegrown talent such as Julia Sawalha, Imelda Staunton, Timothy Spall, Jane Horrocks, Phil Daniels and Miranda Richardson adding to the quaint-yet-crazed atmosphere and while the inclusion of Mel Gibson’s vocal chords as the roguish Rocky make ruffle some feathers in this day and age, it made perfect sense back in 2000.
Of course, we haven’t even gotten around to mention the flawless production design and the look of the characters themselves (which, in a review concerning Aardman is an absolute crime) abd once again, we’re treated to truly one of the most inventive movies ever hatched, I mean how on earth can Park and Lord insist on the chickens to come equipped with those trademark Aardman human teeth and not come across as haunting mutants? It’s alchemy I tells ya!
Even the rousing score, provided by John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams understands the assignment totally, perfectly evoking that can-do, wartime spirit while still remembering that this is an actual film for children and deploying kazoos during the extra stressful bits.

Oddly not as widely embraced as some of the more beloved works from Disney, Pixar or Ghibli, Chicken Run nevertheless exists as a movie that neither of those three major studios could actually manage to pull off anywhere near as well as this dedicated band of clay slingers and frame takers. Sure, Uncle Walt, John Lasseter and Hayao Miyazaki would give it their best shot, but none of them could pull off a scene where a chicken gets pushed in a swing made of a pair of y-fronts half as well.
Absolutely clucking marvellous.
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