Sober when I saw it, sober when I left

Rating: Null/10 (25 June 2000)

I was speechless (with laughter) after The Wrong Trousers and I loved Nick Park's other shorts, especially the languid leopard from Creature Comforts.
So, I'm upset that Chicken Run didn't work for me, though it had lots of fun moments and a good ending. A few things bugged me:
1. The camerawork jokes on various movies drew attention to the clay medium, without allowing the characters to play around with being unreal. It broke my identification with the characters.
2. Emotional scenes were played very straight. Giving Ginger the hiccups when she gets feeling lovey would have been a great bit. Or SOMETHING.
3. "Look, chickens doing ..." is maybe too old a joke. I laughed when the rabbit leans on the hunter's gun and says, "What's up, Doc?" After that ... even Gromit's joke was never "how's Gromit going to do this undogly thing," but "EEEK Gromit-the-dog is doing this completely ludicrously impossible thing!"
4. There's a big difference, masked by tricky animation technique, between the "holy s---!" moments of The Wrong Trousers and the "yeah, and, what?" moments of Chicken Run.
5. Too long. The slower pacing drew too much attention to the medium, see #1.
I think the good lessons of the Wallace and Gromit films and of Babe (where "pigs can't be sheepdogs!" was a serious ideological problem) were not properly applied in Chicken Run. I'd like Aardman Animations to stay away from feature films until they've maybe done some cheap live action movies and feel comfortable satirizing feature films, from start to finish.