Nick Park won two Academy Awards and a growing cult following for his animated shorts starring Wallace and Gromit. Fans of The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave should enjoy Chicken Run, Park's first feature film. (Two more are in the works: The Tortoise and the Hare, and The Wallace and Gromit Movie.)
Park and his collaborator Peter Lord are now the most famous practitioners of stop-motion animation using clay models. The technique has been around for long before King Kong (1933), and has a peculiar charm that contemporary computer animation lacks. While Toy Story II is more visually stunning (and is a much better film as well), even that epitome of virtual reality is not as endearing as Park's much toiled over clay models.
But the models have their limitations of movement and expression. The chickens and their human oppressors all look eerily like Wallace, especially when they talk. Their mouths become large ellipses, that grow and shrink during speech. The mouths become so large that the cheeks swell beyond the ears. This curious, repetitive phenomena partly results from the small scale of the models, but mostly is an idiosyncrasy of Park's artistic style.
Nonetheless, variety is achieved through inventive camera angles, and mood is created through lighting techniques, just as in a live action film. The characters and story, while good, are nothing special. However, the script, gags, and 'stunts' are very entertaining.
Yes, that is Mel Gibson as the voice of Rocky the Rooser. But somehow, to me Rocky sounds more like Tim Allen, perhaps due to his similarities in personality to the swaggering, mock heroic Buzz Lightyear. Rocky is a rooster on the run from a circus, who has trained him to 'fly'. He crash lands in a chicken farm, whose only other rooster is the elderly 'colonel' Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow). The farm is run by money-grubbing villainess Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), whose clumsy, henpecked husband is voiced by Tony Haygarth.
The Tweedys have themselves a chicken dinner whenever one of the hens stops laying eggs. Tension for the hens increases further, when Mrs. Tweedy purchases a machine for turning chickens into pot pie.
The farm is in reality a combined prison and concentration camp for the chickens. Their leader is Ginger (Julia Sawalha), who along with Rocky tries to organize a massive break-out. This leads to in-joke send-ups of The Great Escape (1963), although the story becomes more original as it moves along.
Dreamworks studio executive Jeffrey Katzenberg had Lord and Park tone down the British slang used throughout the script. But the accents and many expressions have survived the supervisory process. I can't say that I know the meaning of nellypodging and codswallop, but it doesn't make the dialogue any less funny.
Just as The Wrong Trousers (and Toy Story) was at its best during the wildly impressive chase scene during the finale, Chicken Run peaks during the imaginative, frantic action sequences. Rocky and Ginger somehow survive an encounter with an enormous, elaborate, murderous pie making machine, and the suspense is as gripping (and more fun) than can be found in many Hitchcock films. (66/100)
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