“A small masterpiece of cinematic storytelling”: Chicken Run reviewed in 2000

The high concept behind Chicken Run is that it is a prisoner-of-war film featuring grimacing plasticine chickens in place of Richard Attenborough, John Mills or any other persistent screen escapee from Colditz or Stalag 17. To underline this, there are enormously pleasurable quotes from John Sturges’ The Great Escape (1962), the only POW film liable to be familiar to an international audience. After each failed escape attempt, Ginger, the mastermind behind the chicken’s plans, is confined to a coal bunker where she bounces a Brussels sprout just as “cooler king” Steve McQueen did a baseball in solitary confinement. The finale of the film also sees a tricycling Rocky, a rooster, pull off (albeit in reverse) the wire-jumping motorcycle stunt that was McQueen’s finest moment in The Great Escape.

From the hoary but still-fresh experiences of World War II which the cockerel Fowler recounts to the snatches of early rock ‘n’ roll (‘Flip, Flop and Fly’) on the wireless, Chicken Run would seem to be set sometime in the 50s. Not only does this make for some lovely period touches (a Toblerone carton is used for a “chocs away” gag), but the setting allows directors Nick Park and Peter Lord — both leading figures in Aardman, the Bristol-based animation company behind Chicken Run — to play on the fact that an oppressive farm from that time, with its barbed chicken wire and neat rows of wooden huts, bears some resemblance to a movie stalag. Thankfully, they avoid any direct references to modern battery farms, which if transplanted to Aardman-land might seem more like extermination camps than rough-and-ready POW enclosures. This said, the film isn’t without its darker moments, notably a post-Babe touch of cruelty when Mrs Tweedy uses a chopper to dispose of an unproductive hen.

The chickens’ construction of a homemade flying machine has a precedent in an episode of the 70s television series Colditz where prisoners cobbled together a glider from found materials (which itself echoes a true historical incident). In Chicken Run, the aircraft knocked together by the inmates is a delightful combination of slave galley and airliner with lazily flapping wings. It’s tempting here to detect the influence of such film fantasists as Karel Zeman or Terry Gilliam. But the flying machine has a more immediate stylistic predecessor in the elaborate contraptions which featured in co-director Park’s award-winning Wallace and Gromit short films. Though the characters in Chicken Run are well defined and have their share of memorable moments, no cast members quite match up to Wallace and Gromit’s inspired inventor-dog double-act. The added length of a feature doesn’t help: some of the minor players — wartime bore Fowler, aggressive hen Bunty — are one-joke creations who repeat their shtick two or three times with little development and diminishing effect.

Pitched almost as a UK answer to Toy Story, Chicken Run offers a specific British setting (albeit with an American guest star) and employs animation techniques which are (ostensibly) as old-fashioned and hand-crafted as Toy Story’s CGI imagery is high-tech and virtual. Like Toy Story, the tale hinges on bickering between two characters, replacing the past/future opposition of Woody and Buzz with the Brit/Yank opposition of Ginger and Rocky. Ginger, voiced with spirit by Julia Sawalha, is a British escape-film officer incarnate, not satisfied unless the whole prison population can head for freedom, while Rocky, drawled to near-creepy perfection by Mel Gibson, is the hollow blowhard hero who pulls through in the end.

The voice casting — including instantly recognisable turns from Jane Horrocks as the chicken with an obsession with holidays and Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels as wide-boy rats who object to being paid “chicken-feed” — is spot-on. But it’s the model work and animation that make these creatures so vivid. With wide eyes and broad grins (hen’s teeth are not rare hereabouts) the poultry cast are capable of an extraordinary range of expression, especially during the sad or mildly scary scenes.

Taking a sequence almost at random and breaking it down to its components, you realise just how much physical and emotional texture Park and Lord have worked into crafting their film’s seemingly effortless charm. (As with the best children’s movies, which are likely to be viewed over again on video by their young audiences, Chicken Run rewards repeated viewings.) The scene in which Ginger discovers the truth about Rocky, for instance, features an inspired narrative device as she joins together two halves of a poster that reveal the rooster can only fly by being shot from a cannon. It’s a small masterpiece of cinematic storytelling: as tear-like animated raindrops fall all around, a thunderclap erupts in the distance, acting as a literal burst of understanding and an imagined, mocking echo of Rocky’s impression of flight.

► Chicken Run returns to UK cinemas 24 July.