No chicken escapes from Tweedy’s farm,” says an ominous voice as we look over the confines of that farm. It looks very much like a prisoner-of-war camp. In fact, Chicken Run, the delightful new animated feature from the makers of TV hit Wallace and Gromit, has a lot in common with those old prisoner-of-war films in which our courageous heroes keep trying to escape, trying one ingenious but ill-fated plan after another.
The hero here, or the heroine, is Ginger (voice by Julia Sawalha), who keeps urging her feathered co-inmates to free themselves from egg-laying captivity. When an American cockerel, Rocky Rhodes (voice by Mel Gibson), accidentally drops in one day, Ginger sees the chickens’ best (and last) chance for escape before they are all fed into a terrifying pie machine. Of course things do not go quite as planned.
In the meantime, there is a lot to laugh at – and much to sympathise with. Nick Park’s multi-coloured plasticene creatures are more radish-shaped than chickenesque, but they work as characters. He draws an amazing amount of expressiveness from their schematic features and pop-out eyes. We develop much feeling for never-say-die Ginger, as well as a fondness for other characters such as the struttingly arrogant Rocky (a parodic version of an American World War II fighter pilot) and the endearingly ditzy Babs (Jane Horrocks). The fascistic farmers, the Tweedys, are exquisitely portrayed, the lumpen idiocy of Mr Tweedy (Tony Haygarth) set beside the dictatorial cruelty of Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson).
It is something of an achievement to make a funny, feel-good film without relying on stock material that has already been run a thousand times through the movie-machine. To make it with stop-motion animation, using bulbous, garish chickens as your protagonists, is an achievement indeed. To make a movie that will entertain children while also holding the attention of adults is something quite special; neither The Grinch, nor Titan AE, the big movies aiming at the younger end of the market this festive season, manages it. Instead, that triumph belongs to the poultry.