Run, Chicken Run!

The inmates of Hut 17 are planning a great escape. Viewers will get one in this high, wild and hen-some stop-motion adventure

  • Share
  • Read Later

(2 of 3)

The mood is less brave than bleak on the moor of Tweedy's farm, in the mid-'50s. Mrs. Tweedy, the vicious camp commandant (voiced by Miranda Richardson), and her slow-witted, henpecked husband (Tony Haygarth) have shown her prisoners what happens to a hen who hasn't laid eggs: it becomes a chicken with its head cut off. This fowl existence is driving even Ginger (Julia Sawalha, known to U.S. viewers as young Saffy on the Brit-import sitcom Absolutely Fabulous) close to desperation. Then, out of the sky, a savior drops with a thud. He is Rocky Roads (Gibson), the "flying rooster" from a traveling circus, and he vainly promises to teach the hens--this coop of flighty, flightless birds--how to soar to freedom. But while Rocky the flying churl plays up to "all the beautiful English chicks," Mrs. Tweedy has bigger, nastier plans. She has bought a machine that will turn her chicken stalag into a factory for chicken pies. The prison camp is to be a death camp.

Chicken Run's style and tone will be endearingly familiar to those who have seen Park's Oscar-winning short work. Creature Comforts (1989) attached the comments of zoo visitors to claymated lions, bears and baby hippos, with sad and hilarious results. The trio A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995) were mini-epics starring Wallace, a staid, daft suburban bachelor inventor, and his brilliant, long-suffering dog Gromit. Park has now adapted to feature length his obsession with the forlorn wit of caged animals, with the quiet exasperation of rural English life, with complex machinery destined to go wrong--and with bead-eyed, lipless creatures who have more lower teeth (six or eight) than upper (four). These features give his characters a perpetually dazed expression, as if they've been beaten goofy by life's inequities and iniquities. Simply to keep going is an act of heroism.

Park, Lord and screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick stocked Chicken Run with a cross section of Brit types: Bunty (Imelda Staunton) is bossy; silly Babs (Jane Horrocks, who played Bubble on Ab Fab) is forever knitting--when she gets morose, she knits a noose. Mac (Lynn Ferguson) is the nearsighted soul of Scottish ingenuity. Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow), a crusty veteran of the RAF, says Yanks can't be trusted: "always late for every war." The hens' lines to the outside world are Nick (Timothy Spall) and Fetcher (Phil Daniels), two music-hall Cockney rats--larcenists with a soft streak.

It all might seem fanciful, but for Park, who was raised in rural Lancashire, Chicken Run comes close to a childhood memoir. "My family had chickens," he says, "just as pets. They used to come into the porch and eat the food, like a dog really. Or they'd come in the house and steal things. We couldn't bear to eat them; they were characters. Then when I was 16 or 17, I had a summer job at a chicken-packing factory; we had to fold up plucked chickens and pack them in cellophane trays. I also did a day working in a slaughterhouse--it was horrible. Some of what I saw there did get through to the pie machine in the film."

A team of 25 animators toiled to achieve two or three seconds of footage a day, as Lord and Park patrolled the tiny sets like the barons of Brobdingnag. The Aardman shop buzzed with the work of painters, press molders and a gent known as the mouth-and-beak-replacement coordinator.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3