Not just a chick flick

Rating: 7/10 (18 February 2001)

CHICKEN RUN (2000) ***Â½ Directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park. Voices: Julia Sawalha, Mel Gibson, Miranda Richardson, Jane Horrocks.
The first image you have shows a... Well, it looks like a concentration camp in the Auschwitz style. Many identical small houses, huge wire fences, and it's dark, very dark. But then you see... Well, a chicken trying to escape from the place... but she fails. These failed tries of escaping are shown several times in the hilarious first minutes of CHICKEN RUN, the new stop-motion animation by Peter Lord and Nick Park, the creators of the awarded and worldwide famous cartoons of WALLACE & GROMIT. The unlucky chicken who always ends up in the solitaire (I mean, garbage) is Ginger. And the concentration camp is an English farm in the '50s, owned by Mrs. Tweedy, a mean and ambitious women who mistreats her husband and only thinks about making money with the chicken. Ginger wants to escape at all costs, but there's no way... till heaven sends her the solution: Rocky, a flying rooster from the US who will teach them how to fly. Of course things won't be all right, especially after Mrs. Tweedy buys a new machine for making chicken pies.
Wonderfully written, CHICKEN RUN's greatest virtue is its clever concept. It borrows many elements from real life and action flicks in general and puts it into the chickens' day-by-day life. It works in many levels as a family movie (children are loving it!) but also pleases teenagers and adults- we can have fun with the references to prison/escape and action movies in general. But don't make confusion- this isn't only a satire and the references aren't so obvious as in Mel Brooks' and Leslie Nielsen's parodies. The links are mostly slight, as the farm/concentration camp/repressed chicken/prisoner link I've already mentioned and, for example, a small spoof of the AIR FORCE ONE scene, in which Harrison Ford flies outside a helicopter holding a wire or something close to that.
The stop-motion technic deserves much credit. The WALLACE & GROMIT cartoons were short-feature films, while CHICKEN RUN is an 80 minutes long-feature film. It's not suffice to say that the work was hard- each tiny movement was filmed separately, and then edited- but it was worthy. It's one of those things that you can only see on the big screen of a theater.
The characters are all well defined: Ginger and Rocky are the heroes, Mrs. Tweedy is the villain and Mr. Tweedy is her poor husband, convinced by her that he has hallucinations with the chickens. Rocky has the most famous of the voices: Hollywood star Mel Gibson. Ginger is dubbed by Julia Sawalha and Mrs. Tweedy has the voice of Miranda Richardson.
There are plenty of memorable characters (the two mice, the dumb chicken, the RAF rooster) and delightful scenes (Ginger and Rocky inside the pie machine, the climax) in CHICKEN RUN, that will make this a small classic of animation. Even if we know what is going to happen in the end, we have great fun during the whole film. This colorful story about quest for freedom and liberty is for sure one of the best, funniest, most intelligent and most invigorating animation movies to be released in the past years.