finger-lickin' good

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 2001)

Chickens.
Lots and lots of chickens. Chickens from England, walking, running, and knitting. There's something really funny about British claymation characters, something that the creators of `Wallace and Grommit' have known for quite some time. `Chicken Run', their first full-length animated feature, brings together elements of `The Great Escape', `101 Dalmatians', and even some `Star Trek' to create a hilarious, smart, vegetarian conscious movie.
The crisis: the chickens are prisoners at a farm where unproductive hens are turned into dinner and even the prolific ones are treated like egg-laying slaves. The farm's evil owner then has a moment of fiendish clarity and realizes that gathering and selling eggs is boring. Making chicken pot pies would be much more profitable and probably a heck of a lot more fun, so she buys a pie machine. Well, you can't make pot pies without breakin' a few chickens, but since they're so cute--well, as cute as British chickens can be--we don't want them to die! We want them to run and fly outta there! Wait--chickens can't fly or can they?
They answer is - no, of course chickens can't fly, sorry to disappoint you. But they can sure try, and try they do. This becomes one of the most entertaining parts of the whole film, as most training montages tend to be. With the help of a flying rooster (voice of Mel Gibson), and the leadership of funky chicken Ginger (the daughter from TV show `Absolutely Fabulous'), the ladies try everything from leaping off rooftops to being flung in giant slingshots, all with hilariously unsuccessful results.
Meanwhile, the evil farmer becomes all that much closer to completing her pot pie contraption, and the chickens still don't know how to fly.
Before they can escape they'll have to face the facts and realize that to get out they'll have to use their brains instead of their funny-looking wings. Each chicken has a special skill, from knitting (the fat, naive chicken) to engineering (the Scottish one with bad vision) that will have to work together to get them out.

Boy, the theme sounds corny, but it definitely works in this film.
`Chicken Run' teaches that although we can't fly, we have the right to say `Buwaaauck!' and eat corn off the ground as free fowl, without worry of laying eggs or becoming pot pies. Besides that, those little faces are enough to keep you entertained and wondering just how much patience someone must have to animate a film like this.
My grade for `Chicken Run': A