Best Chick Flick of 2000

Rating: 8/10 (15 February 2018)

Chicken Run is a delightful little stop-motion picture film revolved around chickens that are tired of their boring old lives on the farm. One of the more daring chickens, Babs, knows that they are only being used to create eggs for the farmers and, once they cannot perform anymore they head to the chopping block. Knowing this, she desperately tries to escape the confinement that is the chicken coop, but she fails time and time again. One morning, out of the sky falls a rooster named Rocky who told the chickens that he knew how to fly and could teach them. Sadly, he had hurt his wing in the fall, so he could not do any demonstrations for the other chickens. Every day the chickens would practice flapping their wings and jumping off the rooves of their homes, but no luck. Then the wife, and the REAL owner of the farm, decides the eggs are not making enough money she invests in a machine that would consume mass amounts of chickens and turn them into "homemade" chicken pot pies. When the chickens realized this, they were in an absolute time crunch to escape their inevitable death. By this time, Rocky's wing had healed and they all demanded him do a demonstration for them the next morning. Knowing that he could not really fly on his own, he put up a poster that showed him getting shot out of a cannon and left in the middle of the night. The chickens were then forced to come up with another plan, they were going to build a plane. They stole supplies from the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy, as well as used wood from their own coops. The chickens were barely able to finish the plane in time to beat the machine being built. As they prepare the runway for takeoff Mrs. Tweedy attempts to sabotage them but, Rocky comes back to help. They launch off into the air thinking all is well but, in a last effort Mrs. Tweedy grabs on. They end up kicking her off and escape into the sunset. They then live happy ever after on their own island.
This movie was great for all ages, although it may be meant for younger children, anyone is able to enjoy the family-friendly movie. It really captivates the audience with its diverse genre category. It keeps things light with a lot of comedic scenes to overlook the darker plot of chickens being murdered. There were a handful of times I caught myself chuckling at the various scenes showing you do not need to be young to laugh at this movie. When Rocky arrives into the movie there is an obvious love story brewing between him and Babs, the main chicken behind all the schemes. This drama aspect of the film really gets the viewers to connect with the characters and feel for them. It creates a bond that really captures you into the movie. Lastly, their action-packed escape from the farmers and the death machine has viewers gripping their seats, wondering what is going to happen.
Throughout this movie the writers do a great job building suspense and keeping the viewer on edge. There are two main areas that demonstrate this well. The first being when Babs and Rocky get stuck in the pie making machine. Rocky sees Babs hanging upside down with her feet chained to a conveyor belt on the wall. He runs after her to try and catch her before she falls into a large metal tube that leads into the machine. The slow chase builds suspense in the viewers. Left and right they get so close to death, yet they somehow escape, each time by just a hair. Secondly, when they are in the middle of their final escape, Mrs. Tweedy is hanging on to a string of lights that got loose trying to take off. Babs is trying to cut the lights, so she falls but Mrs. Tweedy pulls out an axe and tries to chop her head off. After she swings we see just a chicken body holding on, giving the impression that she was dead, but she ducked just in time. The writers used this fight to build suspense and give us the false impression that the main character had just been killed.
This movie also uses a lot of classic editing styles. To start off they used the Three-Part POV shot inspired by Hitchcock many times when Mr. Tweedy would be spying on the chickens with his binoculars. We would see Mr. Tweedy in the window looking at the chickens, then we would view into the binoculars and see the chickens trying to fly, then it would zoom out and Mr. Tweedy would react with astonishment and check again. This time, he would just find them doing regular chicken-like activities. Another editing style they used which is used in many modern films is classical cutting. Many times, they would show characters walking out of frame and instead of following them it would just cut to another frame that they are just beginning to walk into as if it was just continuous the entire time.