CHICKEN RUN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: The British Aardman Animation
team, Oscar winners, make their first feature
length film. It is a satire on all those old
World War II POW escape films, especially THE
GREAT ESCAPE. But it is done as chickens trying
to escape from a chicken farm. The film relies
too heavily on that one joke. Somehow the
Aardman charm just does not work for 85 minutes.
We are left with a few jokes that really are
funny and a lot that is overly familiar and not
very good. The film did not work for me.
Rating: 4 (0 to 10), 0 (-4 to +4)
Nick Park is now a three time Academy Award winner having won Oscars for his shorts "Creature Comforts," "The Wrong Trousers," and "A Close Shave." The latter two feature his characters Wallace and Gromit. He has made his trademark to have his clay animation characters have teeth that do not quite fill the cheeks from side to side so there is a gap on each side. In this country his style may best be recognized in some commercials he has done, particularly Chevron ads with talking cars. It takes a little chutzpah for him to do a feature length film with chickens satirizing World War II POW escape films like THE PASSWORD IS COURAGE, STALAG 17, THE COLDITZ STORY, and especially THE GREAT ESCAPE. In the first place it is a little hard for Park and co-director Peter Lord to sustain one joke for that length of time. The joke in his popular Wallace and Gromit stories are that Wallace is such a dull personality. It takes considerably more character value to keep an audience interested for 85 minutes. In the second place chickens do not have teeth or wide cheeks so he must give up his trademark or have his chickens look not very much like chickens. He does the latter. Does the Nick Park charm work for a feature film? In my opinion, not really. There were chuckles throughout the film but the story is cliched and silly. Apparently that is part of the point and that can be done in satire if the film just remains entertaining. It becomes a little too much of the same good thing.
Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha) is one smart chicken. She knows that her days are numbered at the chicken farm where she lives. Sooner or later she will stop producing eggs. And she knows that when a chicken stops providing breakfast, she provides dinner. So every night she tries to escape from the barbed wire fences and every night she is caught and thrown into solitary confinement. After several attempts and after involving other chickens, she is about at her chicken-wits' end.
No escape plan works until an American rooster named Rocky the Rooster (Mel Gibson) comes flying over the compound one day. So chickens can fly! The news is inspiration to all the hens. They convince a reluctant Rocky to teach the group to fly and lead them all over the fence. There are a lot of jokes, but most are more cute than funny. The few surprises in the plot have a way of telegraphing themselves. The plot seems to have been written on autopilot and, except for the choice of animals, is very familiar. John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams provide a nice military score reminiscent of Elmer Bernstein's score for THE GREAT ESCAPE.
Park and Lord have chosen a number of major British actresses to voice the chickens and humans, though their names will be familiar mostly to art house crowds here. He has Miranda Richardson (of THE CRYING GAME and MERLIN), Jane Horrocks (of LITTLE VOICE) and Imelda Staunton. The main character is played by Julia Sawalha who is almost unknown in the US. To balance this, apparently top billing unjustifiably goes to Mel Gibson.
Park's cartoons have always had a dark side and this film has a few grim scenes involving head chopping that could be disturbing to younger children, so parents should not be fooled by the G-rating. In some ways this film is even grimmer than the war films it imitates. The prisoners in the war had the Geneva Convention to give them some protection and they could look forward to being released at the end of the war. These chickens could be killed any time at the farmer's will and their captivity would never end of its own. So if you look for it the story is fairly grim. Still, the script shies away from looking at the implications of the treatment of domestic animals unlike some better films like Caroline Thompson's excellent BLACK BEAUTY (1994).
This film is a "curate's egg" as the British would say. Some parts are much better than others. Overall it does not deliver quite enough. I give it a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale. Stay through the end of the credits.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 2000 Mark R. Leeper
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