Coop D'Etat

Rating: Null/10 (2 August 2000)

Eyes, popularly, are considered windows to the soul. But in the anatomy book of genius-tinged animator Nick Park and his cohorts at Aardman, teeth really tell the story. Beginning with the Academy Award-winning 1989 short "Creature Comforts" and through his epic Wallace and Gromit mini-adventures, Park has filled the mouths of his saunchly English, valiantly middle-class players (clay animated penguins and sheep as well as ladies and gents) with soulful choppers: In good times and bad, the set of an Aardman jaw speaks volumes as said penguin, sheep, dog, woman or man adapts with tea-and-toast-loving civility to unpredictable (and usually daunting) fate.
In their first full-length feature, the care Park and co-director Peter Lord lavish on the dental work of poultry (who it can now be proven, do have lips) pays off.
"Chicken Run" is a delightful, perceptive, funny, detail-barbed wire, which looks as gloomy as POW barracks; indeed, the command-center hut in which the fearless Ginger plots her flock's great escape bears the same number as that of "Stalag 17."
Just when Ginger has run out of idea - she gets a little help from the farm's more timid clucker's including Pollyanna-daft Babs, worrying Mac, and overbearing Bunty - a possible savior falls of the sky sky, like a Yank on a parachute mission. According to the circus poster that floats down with him Rocky is "The Flying Rooster." Surely he can teach his admiring audience of grounded ladies to do the same?
"Chicken Run" is a can-do comedy built of small, confident gestures. It's a piece with other Aardman projects, not a breakthrough in form or content. But the cosy, period-piece story is sharpened by Karey Kirkpatrick's bright script. The wit is droll, heightened by the whistle-through-danger musical score. The throw-away references to other movies, plays and transatlantic cultural attitudes are a tickle. And the technique is remarkably fluid as ever. (One cackle: an excellent clay-animation spit take.)
The vocal talents are uniformly superior, from Mel Gibson playing the vain celebrity, to Miranda Richardson as the classically pinched villainess, Mrs. Tweedy. This excellence is the work of human actors who never feel the need to outshine their characters. It's also the work of Nick Park and his team, Englishmen who in the defiance of their national image, pay careful attention to the teeth of the matter.