POULTRY IN MOTION
CHICKEN RUN
Directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park
Written by Lord, Park, & Karey Kirkpatrick
Voices of Mel Gibson, Julia Sawalha
UA North, De Vargas PG 85 min
Just when it was starting to look like comedy was plucked, along comes the funniest movie of the year to put it back on its perch. This will come as no surprise to fans of Nick Park and Peter Lord, the geniuses behind the Oscar-winning Wallace and Gromit shorts.
Park and Lord work in claymation, a process so slow and painstaking you can't imagine how they can find anything funny. But oh, do they! In their first feature-length film, produced through Dreamworks, they've created a hilarious spoof on WWII POW movies like The Great Escape. But you don't have to know the sources - Chicken Run is funny and endearing and completely entertaining in its own right.
The action takes place on the chicken farm of Mr. And Mrs. Tweedy (Tony Haygarth and Miranda Richardson), a grim stalag of barracks where chickens must produce or perish. Some of them take it lying down, but not Ginger (Julia Sawalha of TV's AbFab), a plucky little hen with escape in her blood. "So, laying eggs all your life and then getting stuffed and roasted, that's good enough for you, is it?" she demands, to which another chicken (Jane Horrocks of Little Voice) replies "It's a living."
When the Tweedys install a chicken pot pie machine, things get desperate - when out of the sky comes what looks like the answer to Ginger's prayers: Rocky the Flying Rooster (Mel Gibson), a refugee from a circus who calls himself "The Lone Free Ranger." She offers to hide him if he'll teach them all how to fly.
What makes Lord and Park's work so great is a deeply wonderful sense of humor, both verbal and visual. It's in the timing, in the characters, in the lines, in the lighting and the camera angles and the sets and the music (including the R&B classic "Flip, Flop and Fly".) In a world of computerized high-tech, this is basic, and brilliant.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews