Chicken Run
Chicken, A’ La King
If you have read other reviews of Chicken Run, and are just now reading this one (thank you, by the way, I appreciate it), you may have noticed the same thing that I did. For some reason, most of the reviews that I read before seeing the movie covered the same ground over and over again. There was a sameness about them that was a bit troubling; a unanimity that seemed somewhat unnatural, even spooky.
The reviews I’ve read all contained horrible chicken-related puns (which I’ve tried to avoid, save in the title). They also contained these elements, in no particular order:
- Chicken Run is the new movie from British animators Nick Park and Peter Lord.
- They are the creators of something called Wallace & Gromit, a series of claymation films that regularly wins the sort of Oscars that are given out in the first half-hour of the show, usually by Christian Slater and Rosie Perez.
- The characters are claymation chickens, trying to escape from a grim chicken farm, where they face being turned into pies. They’re all Brits, mostly.
- The main characters are Ginger (voiced by Julie Sawahla; Saffron from AbFab) and Rocky (voiced by Mel Gibson, the lone Yank). The Cruella DeVille of the piece is Mrs. Tweedy (voiced by the incomparable Miranda Richardson, who’s not given enough lines).
- The plot is a rehash of all the great WWII prison camp films, especially The Great Escape. The hens roost in Stalag — I mean Hut — 17.
- It is not a Disney animated movie; it’s much darker in all sorts of ways and even includes (literally) some gallows humor. (It’s from Dreamworks.)
- It is a technical masterpiece, with Park and Lord combining claymation with superb backgrounds to create a seamless live-action adventure.
If any of the above items pique your interest, you’re probably just coming back from Chicken Run or on your way to see it. Wallace & Gromit fans, I’m told, have been salivating for weeks. Parents looking for a good family film should be packing up the minivan. WWII movie fans — like me — are all set, so are Mel Gibson fans and animation geeks.
Relatively speaking, this is a mighty small audience for any movie, and speaks to the paucity of animated WWII movies featuring chickens. This review, therefore, is directed at the average casual moviegoer. This review is dedicated to everyone who’s ever been ahead of me at a ticket line, scratching his head, looking at the movie selections like it was a calculus proof or the Internal Revenue Code or the script to Battlefield Earth or something else completely incomprehensible. This review is dedicated to anyone who’s ever said, “I don’t know, honey, what do you want to see?”
Go see this movie.
I don’t want to hear any arguments. I don’t care if you don’t like Mel Gibson, or animation, or British comedy, or life in general. You will like this movie. You will enjoy it, you will laugh at loud at all of the goofy, silly movie references, you will cheer the chickens as they try to make their escape from Tweedy Farm. You will even like the weak parts of the movie, like the musical number, because they lead to the slam-bang gee-whiz rocket-powered ending that rivals even Gone In Sixty Seconds for sheer adrenaline rush.
Chicken Run is so wonderfully done and has such broad-based, popular appeal that it’s hard to imagine anyone going and not having a good time. John Rocker could go see this movie in Queens — in full uniform — and have everyone come out smiling. Bill Gates and Janet Reno could go see this movie together. (Bill would have to buy the popcorn; he’s about the only one who can afford it.)
Chicken Run has lots of movie references. This contributes to the overall sense of fun. so much so that I won’t bother pointing them out in this space. However, the spirit of Chicken Run is distilled in a quote from one of the few movies that’s not explicitly mentioned; Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption. Andy Dufresne tells us that we’d “better get busy living, or get busy dying,” and that’s a feeling that Chicken Run has internalized. It is a busy, busy movie, with plans and plots and sticky situations galore, but the busyness is all directed towards the goal of staying alive and becoming free.
I could go on, of course, but I’ve been asked not to, and I seriously don’t know what else I could say to get you to plunk down your seven bucks to go see Chicken Run, except that you should, and quickly.