A review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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I wish I could see Chicken Run for the first time again. But it’s too late. The theatre meddled with my ability to enjoy this wonderful little movie. First, the projector broke. Then, finally, after a ten minute delay, the movie played from a projector with a dim bulb, and the sound turned down far too low. I felt like I was at the back of the world’s longest movie theatre, straining to see and hear what was going on.
And yet, the movie was still a coop-ful of laughs.
Chicken Run is the best family film of the summer, and probably of the year. Since the death of Jim Henson, only Pixar Animation studios have managed to strike a good balance of heart and humor in animated features. Now, Dreamworks has collaborated with Nick Parks and Peter Lord (of Wallace and Gromit fame) to create what deserves to be the first full-length claymation blockbuster. It’s a great story for children that’s packed with humor for adults and, for the cinema buff, delightful homages to a dozen other films, especially The Great Escape.
The chickens in question live on a chicken farm under the dark shadow of Mrs. Tweedy and her dimwitted husband. They’re marked for death, and the big-hearted hen named Ginger is working overtime trying to find and escape route.
The rest of the chickens seem more entertained than interested as Ginger is captured, time and time again, by Mr. Tweedy, who punishes her and throws her back into the coop. When Ginger is at her wits’ end, wondering what possibility they haven’t tried, one empty-headed bird muses “We haven’t tried not escaping.”
The severity of this whole affair was declared in the opening act of the movie. This isn’t exactly the threat of boredom and incarceration that scared Woody and Buzz in Toy Story 2–this is certain death. The imminent fate of the chickens is promised with such a serious foreboding that even the grownups in the audience are drawn to the edge of their seat. When one chicken is taken to the chopping block, and then, oh no… executed… the theatre becomes so silent you could hear an M&M drop.
From that moment on, we’re rooting for the chickens to get out from under the hatchet of this wicked pastry-making Cruella de Ville. Now, when Ginger rallies the troops for escape, the rest of the chickens are game (sorry!)
In The Great Escape, a cocky American saved the day for a bunch of Brits. This time, an arrogant American rooster who falls from the sky may be the sole hope for a captive bunch of Brit chickens. He’s identified as Rocky the Flying Rooster, and, well, the promise of such a title is clear. Soon all of the chickens are on Rocky’s workout program while he enjoys his celebrity and the fact that the ladies are all ga-ga over him.
One of the strokes of brilliance in this film is that, even though the hero is “American”, and even though he is voiced by Mel Gibson, he’s actually not much help at all. He’s American in that he’s full of hot air, ready to spread delusions to cover up the brutal truth of suffering and death.
So when things go from bad to worse, America is no longer the great shining hope for the oppressed.
Tired of financial troubles. Mrs. Tweedy conspires to become rich with the use of a newfangled meat pie-making machine. The chickens, of course, are the meat. The audience is drawn into a gruesome journey through this fowl-mangling mechanism as the first guinea pigs (guinea hens?) are sent into its massive, deadly gears. We know Tweedy means business.
The voices of these characters are as much a part of their life as their evocative faces. Julia Sawahla is the film’s strong emotional center as Ginger. Gibson is playful, funny, and almost unrecognizable in this light-hearted turn as Rocky. But best of all is Jane Horrocks as the village idiot, the perpetually knitting little chick named Babs. “I don’t want to be a pie!” Babs exclaims, adding, “I don’t like gravy.”
If only the movie took more advantage of such promising personalities. Except for Rocky and Ginger, the characters stay fairly settled in their one distinguishing characteristic. The film lacks the unpredictable, sharp dialogue of Toy Story, and the poetry that made The Iron Giant such an emotionally affecting event. While the animation is enthralling, the script is a bit formulaic. Chicken puns come at us fast and furious. I wondered if the movie might have been funnier if they had backed off from the obvious jokes and concocted funnier situations or personalities. For this moviegoer, the film’s finale was boisterous, but unsurprising.
Nevertheless, Chicken Run certainly belongs in any child’s movie collection right alongside those classics. It celebrates teamwork, it laughs at American pretension, and it lifts our hopes to break out of our own various prisons.
Best of all, it succeeds because of the small miracles that only happen through claymation. It’s exciting to know that these figures onscreen, like the Muppets, actually exist in three dimensions; and it’s a wonder to know that each frame of this film was handmade, not orchestrated by a computer. The joy of this film is in the details… the facial expressions sometimes deeply emotive and others astonishingly void of intelligence. I laughed almost as much looking through a book about the movie as I did watching it; the longer you stare at those eyes and teeth, the funnier they get.
So be sure you get to a theatre, whether you have children or not, just to see on a big screen this magical world from Aardman’s Peter Lord and Nick Parks. Here’s hoping it’s only the beginning of a long-running big screen tradition, like the Muppets, or Pixar, or Disney Studios back when Disney knew how to deliver a genuine story rather than a marketing event.
Perhaps they’ll get around to bringing their strongest characters, Wallace and Gromit, to their first feature-length film at last. I hope so. Even though the theatre did all it could to screw up my experience, I was dazzled by the imagination on display in Chicken Run.