Chicken Run
by Sasha Stone

Not even the repugnant ad campaign, ordering all children to save the chickens by buying a hamburger at Burger King, can spoil the pure delight of Chicken Run.

Directed by Oscar-winning claymation animators Peter Lord and Nick Park, Chicken Run does anything but lay an egg, even though its heroes - almost all female, with a few exceptions - are imprisoned to do just that.

Tweedy's chicken farm looks an awful lot like Auschwitz, with ferocious guard dogs barking back any chicken who might have the silly idea to escape. If you make it past the dogs, you have Mr. Tweedy to contend with, the trod-upon husband of Mrs. Tweedy.

The hen ringleader, Ginger (voice of Julia Sawalha), wants to free all hens from the daily grind of laying eggs until they can lay no more, at which time they are left to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. Literally!

Ginger's dream of freedom is what any prisoner born in captivity might dream of - just the simple pleasure of feeling the grass under her feet. But, alas, poor Ginger, and the others, are all facing their imminent mortality. That they realize their fate is perhaps the real tragedy of being a caged thing. We tend to view chickens as having such small brains that they couldn't possibly comprehend the horrors we inflict upon them.

The chickens' fate is entirely in the hands of Mrs. Tweedy, the bastard child of Margaret Hamilton and a box of matchsticks, who has figured out that egg selling is just chicken feed; the real payoff is in chicken parts, especially if they're chopped up and baked in a pie.

Ginger and the other hens need a miracle. Ginger's prayers are answered when a hysterical flying chicken, Rocky (voice of Mel Gibson) flaps into their coop. That's it, Ginger decides. Rocky will teach the chickens how to fly and that will give them their freedom! Only, it turns out, Rocky has his own problems.

The claymation is said to have been so labor-intensive that it took a whole day for just one second of screen time. This new style is smoother than the claymation we're used to in, say, Gumby. Indeed, one of the directors, Nick Park, has already proved how captivating the medium can be with his marvelous Wallace and Gromit series. The same way dear Gromit expressed volumes with one twitch of an eyebrow, so do these chickens, who have as much, or more, facial expressions as real people. This is careful, loving work, so much so that these chickens come alive in every respect.

The makers of Chicken Run, specifically DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg (who executive produced), took no chances with the accents - where they might have Americanized the whole thing, there is only Rocky (Gibson doing American), while the rest are these send-ups of familiar English types, birds, if you will.

Chicken Run is the latest children's film to teach a lesson in compassion to its audience. Only through this kind of symbolic storytelling can the plight of animals be truly realized, and it is an enduring, agonizing plight at times, one we travel alongside, without ever really having the chance to contemplate it in our favorite arena of redemption: the cinema. While Babe gave bacon a face, this film should give our feathered friends their place in the sun. And Ginger is the thing with feathers that eventually finds a way to fly in the face of impossibility toward the land of hope and dreams.

CineScene, 2000