/ 20 March 2001

Feathers fly in Chicken Run row

It was a simple story that won the hearts of America and turned the Oscar-winning British animator Nick Park into a major Hollywood player.

But Chicken Run, the comic film that made more than $100 million in the United States, has made at least one man miserable.

Alan Davidson, the children’s author, has watched with growing annoyance as the cartoon feature, co-produced with Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio, became the third most popular film of last year on both sides of the Atlantic, beaten only by Toy Story II and Gladiator.

Behind the scenes, Davidson is fighting a battle. He claims the story about a plucky band of chickens who break out from a battery farm was stolen from his own book, Escape from Cold Ditch, published in 1994. The author first alerted the Bristol-based film-makers to the similarity in the plot last year and asked them to explain the coincidence, but his allegations have been firmly rejected.

Since then the dispute has been continued in a sharp exchange of letters between his solicitors, Sheridans, and D J Freeman, which represents Nick Park and his partner, Peter Lord.

“Mr Davidson has not wanted to speak out publicly about this at the moment, but he is extremely angry,” said Stephen Taylor, his solicitor.

“We believe we have a strong case of breach of copyright, and we will be demanding substantial damages. There are more than 300 points of similarity between the stories, particularly when you compare the recent novelisation of the film with theoriginal, Escape from Cold Ditch. There are matches both in plot points and in characterisation.”

Taylor said that his legal team were about to send out a letter detailing all the alleged copyright infringements and that they were prepared to trace the link between the two creative processes in court.

When it came out, Escape from Cold Ditch, published by Straw Hat, was described as a “marvellously original fable” and adopted for use in school reading lessons. It tells of a chicken which yearns to set its incarcerated sisters free. Just like Chicken Run, the narrative mimics the style of a Second World War prison escape drama. Its writer grew up with hens in his backyard and is a campaigner against battery farming. In spite of the prospect of a long legal wrangle with Park’s company Aardman Animation and with DreamWorks, Davidson has told his solicitor he is not prepared to back down.

A spokesman for Aardman said any legal action would be vigorously defended. “Chicken Run is based on an original concept and story by its directors Nick Park and Peter Lord and the claim is strenuously denied.”

Aardman has always confidently maintained that the idea came from a one-off sketch by Park of a chicken escaping from a farm.

The film depicts the farm as a prisoner-of-war camp, down to the hand-crafted barbed wire, and Park has always referred to it as The Great Escape with hens. He said the story went down particularly well with Spielberg who told them the PoW film was his favourite movie and that he also had a farm with 300 chickens.

Park’s plot has an egg-layer named Ginger who leads a revolt among the birds held on a grim farm in Northern England. The characters were voiced by Jane Horrocks, Julia Sawahla and Mel Gibson.

Aardman was founded by Lord and David Sproxton in 1976 and began on a kitchen table. Their first national success was as creators of the Plasticine character, Morph, which appeared on the television show Take Hart.

Lord and Sproxton spotted the talent of Park in 1986 when he was a student and together they went on to make the three award-winning Wallace and Gromit films: A Grand Day Out, A Close Shave and The Wrong Trousers. Revenues from the merchandising of the characters in the films now runs to more than £50 million a year.

In October 1999 the company signed a £155m, five-film deal with DreamWorks SKG, the new studio run by Jeffrey Katzenberg in partnership with Spielberg. DreamWorks has already challenged Disney’s domination of feature animation with the films Antz and Prince Of Egypt.

The next Aardman feature is to be an updated version of time-honoured tale of The Tortoise and the Hare.