'Chicken Run' provides fun for children, adults

By Tom McHenry
Summer Editor

A few problems with the movie up front- chickens shouldn’t have teeth and adults shouldn't have this much fun in a child's movie.

"Chicken Run" is simultaneously a prison escape movie, masterpiece of claymation and a philosophical dialogue on age old questions like "Is the grass really greener on the other side?" and "Which came first- the chicken or the egg?"

Set in the WWII style prison camp styled chicken farm, the movie takes every opportunity it can to make in-references to its classic predecessors like "The Great Escape" and "Hogan's Heroes". Ginger, one of the chicken characters, even lives in hen house 17, an in-reference to "Stalag 17".

The Tweeny farm chickens are led by Ginger, a chicken with a knack for planning elaborate escape attempts that are constantly bungled by either her fellow escapees or the hand of fate. She is caught and confined to solitary confinement again and again.

Meanwhile the chickens have to continue laying eggs or they'll be killed and cooked for supper. Only it's hard to focus on laying eggs when they spend their time plotting failed escape after failed escape.

Despite the efforts of Fowler, an aging rooster from the Royal Air Force (based almost assuredly on Alec Guinness' character in "A bridge on the River Kwai"), morale continues to drop.

The arrival of Rocky, a circus rooster from America who can fly, brings the hope Ginger and her fellow chickens may need to escape though by teaching them to fly.

In case you're wondering, chickens can't fly anymore than roosters can lay eggs. That doesn't stop them from trying though, in a "Dumbo" like trial of faith and endurance.

The animation is adorable - stop motion claymation can look crude and choppy at its worst, but "Chicken Run" 's animators have revolutionized the field. With techniques learned in their Academy Award winning "Wallace and Gromit" animated shorts, Aardman Animation challenged themselves with the feature length "Chicken Run."

"Chicken Run" meets and surpasses the challenge. Though it fails to surpass the charm of the original "Wallace and Gromit" shorts, it can stand proudly beside them in the Aardman body of work.

Just as the Muppets made puppetry cool for adults again with the addition of more mature jokes hidden within their simple subject matter, so does "Chicken Run".

If it's possible for there to be sexual tension between chickens, Ginger and Rocky share it. Subtle movements and glances act on an almost subliminal level that makes the clay chickens seem very, very real. But just as Mr. Tweeny must tell himself throughout the film whenever he sees the chickens organizing or plotting against him "It's all in your head."

Where recent advances in computer animation made the toys in "Toy Story" three dimensional and fairly realistic, "Chicken Run" surpasses its realism in that all of the sets and characters actually exist and were constructed in three dimensions.