DIRECTED BY: Nick Park and Peter Lord WRITTEN BY: Nick Park and Peter Lord CAST: Mel Gibson, Julia Sawalha, Lynn Ferguson, Miranda Richardson, Tony Haygarth
Runtime: USA:84
- RATING: 10/10
Dream Works is back! This time with a brilliant animated feature that might very well be the comedy of the year. From the its first shot, when a "chicken-ghetto" is shown, lit up by the pale moon, you'll start chuckling. And when Mel Gibson's (Braveheart) Rocky flies over it, screaming "FREEDOM", you'll be laughing so hard that you'll get a nosebleed. The reason for that 'Chicken Run' is so successful is that the talented Park and Lord found a perfect balance between drama, satire and comedy. It is much more demanding and intelligent than most of the stereotype cartoons produced by Disney evey year, and a lot funnier than Disney's mega-hit "Toy Story 2".
The setting is the Tweedy's, a dank little chicken farm in Yorkshire, England, populated mostly by hens and a few old roosters who are living on borrowed time, slowly awaiting their doom. They are under the mercy of Mrs. Tweedy, a Nazilike woman (voiced by Miranda Richardson), who demands nothing less than productivity from her prisoners in the form of eggs and more eggs. But even when her hens lay eggs at a high rate, it isn't enough for her. The chickens are helpless, slowly awaiting their doom. Some know, some suspect and others do not believe it. Only Ginger, a determined feisty hen with a temper, is trying to escape. She dreams of wild open spaces, freedom and release from fear. There doesn't go a day by, without her trying and failing in her escape. But soon she realizes that there is no way of getting of this farm alive. But everything changes when an upstart Yank literally falls into the hens' midst. Rocky the Flying Rooster, the self-described "lone free-ranger," has made his living being shot from a cannon at a circus. On the lam from his owner, Rocky takes convenient refuge on the farm and does nothing to discourage the idea that he can fly, which allows Ginger to pin all her hopes for a mass escape on Rocky's teaching the girls how to get airborne. At the same time, however, Mrs. Tweedy, fed up with the "minuscule profits" from eggs, decides to build a terrible pie-making machine, which works very simple -- "chickens come in, pies come out". Soon a dark smoke is forcing itself from old pipes....
The confining, prison-like setting, which is rarely left during the film, seems to have placed a sort of dramatic straitjacket on the filmmakers' impulse for nifty side trips and surprising digressions. It is a rather risky attempt to paradise the World War II prison camp thrillers. "Chicken Run" is a holocaust movie about, well, chickens. It's a very smart film, very alert, but it's also incredibly dark film - an allegory disguised as a cartoon that comments on, among other things, our dog-eat-dog society, greed, ruthlessness and cruelty. The characters, all chickens, are jailed, exploited and tortured by humans if they don't cooperate - and are sent to the ovens if they don't reach the daily quota of eggs.
Everything second of what you see on screen is many days of hard work. Every element is made of Plasticine, which means that the directors had to move the figures manually for every little movement. And since there are 24 movements per second, you can imagine why this film took such a long time to complete. This technique is very demanding, but it gives the directors complete control. Because of that there are no accidents, mistakes or surprises during the production. The good thing is that the enormous efforts have paid off. Everything is perfect. The figures look like as they have been made by children - sweet, cartoonish and innocent. The small details in "set decoration" are incredible. Like 'Antz', 'Chicken Run' is a film that plays on several levels, and the more you know about history, films and politics, the more will you enjoy the film. But as it showed out 'Antz' was more appreciated by adults, rather than children. 'Chicken Run' on the other hand, despite of its darker tones, isn't that heavy and thus offers an equal amount of quality entertainment for children as well as adults. The dialogue is wisely structured, with incredibly amusing characters and brilliant parodies on famous Hollywood productions, that are elegantly floating into each other, creating a bright, comic cocktail.
To be sure, "Chicken Run" is always engaging, full of bright humor, marvelous stop-motion work with Plasticine figures, dramatic conflict and wonderfully nuanced characterizations. Indeed, the leading characters are given unusually fine shadings for animated creations, which is partly a tribute to the Aardman team's finesse and partly due to the outstanding casting and performances. Mel Gibson delivers an energetic at times self ironic performance, and of course "Braveheart" is not excluded. The rest of the cast consists of marvelous actors, such as Julia Sawalha and ______ as the proud, elderly chicken general. With their clipped British voices, the hens are like women in a World War II POW flick (Glenn Close's recent "Paradise Road" comes to mind). The Tweedy farm looking like something out of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" (1993), with chicken coops resembling bunkers and fencing topped with barbed wire. Before our disbelieving eyes, a pageant of jeopardy, romance and rescue unfolds. Chickens yelling, "She's gonna blow," chickens jitter-bugging to the classic "Flip Flop and Fly," chickens creating the kind of rousing action finale John Woo would relish. The film is funny, without trying too hard and emotional, without over dramatizing. It's the example of a perfect film, that should be followed by the producers and directors of Walt Disney Pictures. I simply can't imagine someone not enjoying this film. It offers more than enough for any audience member. And let me put it even more strait -- it's enough to become a vegetarian...for life!
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