June 22–29, 2000

movies

Flying Fowl

Flying the coop: Fowler and Ginger plot their escape.

by Sam Adams

Chicken Run

Directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park
A Dreamworks release
Opens Friday at area theaters

Recommended

Aardman Animation’s cartoons have always seemed as English as Flake bars and pasty skin. Best known for Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit cartoons, which feature the misadventures of a tea-loving inventor and his ever-capable pooch, Aardman’s cartoons are both broadly and delicately funny and at the same time grossly absurd and subtly daffy. In the three W&G films, for example, the pair are placed in a series of predicaments absurd enough for any knockabout farce — the plots involve, respectively, a trip to the moon (A Grand Day Out), a pair of mechanical trousers and a penguin on the lam (The Wrong Trousers), and a sheep-shearing syndicate run by an ill-tempered dog (A Close Shave) — but it’s the juxtaposition of these thoroughly outlandish plots with Wallace’s foggy bewilderment (and his inevitable cries of "Gromiiiiiit!") that really makes the series tick. Think of them as plotless characters adrift in a plot-driven world.

Imagine Wallace as a bespectacled boob à la Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor and you have some ideas of the dangers awaiting Chicken Run. Making their first for an American studio and their first feature ever, there was every reason to suspect, or at least fear, that Aardman might have flattened out their humor to find a broader audience, or souped up their plots to fit in better with the cavalcade of summer blockbusters.

And so they have — sort of. With Chicken Run, Park and co-director Peter Lord have managed to have their cake, eat it, and go back for seconds. Instead of a summer action movie, the film plays like a parody of summer action movies, or at least the most eccentric possible twist on them. Blatantly lifting from obvious sources (à la Robert Towne’s much-remarked-upon rewrite of Notorious for Mission: Impossible II), Chicken Run recasts The Great Escape inside Tweedy’s Chicken Farm, where a bevy of Yorkshire hens are held captive by the menacing Mrs. Tweedy (voiced by Miranda Richardson). While plucky Ginger (Absolutely Fabulous’ Julie Sawalha) has masterminded scores of escape plans, and spent many nights confined in the coal bin as a result, she’s never come up with one ingenious enough to rescue the whole flock at once, a plan that becomes urgently necessary when word leaks out that the profit-hungry Mrs. Tweedy has decided to convert each and every one of her egg-layers into chicken pies. (Her scheme is facilitated by a giant pie-making machine that’s a cousin to A Close Shave’s sheep-shearing device.)

Enter Rocky (Mel Gibson). A cocky Rhode Island Red (shades of William Holden in Stalag 17), he’s just pulled off an escape of his own from a circus where he was known as "Rocky the Flying Rooster". That’s right, a flying chicken: in fact, he enters Tweedy’s farm by flying over the barbed-wire fence, although a damaged wing hampers his attempts to get back out again. Though Ginger doesn’t like having her authority usurped and can’t stand Rocky’s cock-of-the-walk attitude, she instantly recognizes that he may be the key to getting the chickens out of Mrs. Tweedy’s once and forever.

The contentious relationship between Ginger and Rocky, which has more than a touch of Hepburn and Tracy to it, grows more so as Rocky continues to postpone fulfilling his promise to teach the rest of the chickens how to fly, and you soon begin to suspect that this particular rooster may not be as immune to the laws of physics as he might claim. As Rocky basks in the attention showered on him while secretly struggling with his guilt, Chicken Run gets a little too close to A Bug’s Life’s deceptive circus bugs for comfort, a kinship only enhanced by Chicken Run’s climax, which features a similarly mechanical solution to the chicken’s predicament.

But where A Bug’s Life was broad and rousing, Chicken Run is manic and breathless. The best jokes are the ones you almost don’t get, as when Rocky finds himself about to tumble into the pie machine’s entrance chute, and, as he plummets, yells, "Shoot!" The sequence that follows, which begins with Rocky trying to rescue Ginger and ends (of course) with her rescuing him, is about as close to an action movie as Chicken Run gets, with the two imperiled fowl fleeing the machine’s perilous cogs and barely escaping with their skins. But when they find themselves trapped in unbaked pies and poke their gravy-covered heads through the crust, you end up laughing at their predicament even as you hope they won’t end up in the frozen foods section. The satire isn’t smarmy, but it’s sure.

At times, Chicken Run tries for too much, and you can’t help wishing they’d cast a subtler actor than Mel Gibson for the lead voice. Gibson certainly has Rocky’s self-assured drawl down pat — no surprise, since Gibson always comes off as a smug bastard — but he’s hopeless at expanding the character beyond that point, and more importantly, he’s not funny. While it’s been nice to see the upsurge in feature-length animation the last several years, it’s a shame that the massive cost of such undertakings necessitates both casting American box-office stars in the lead roles and disallowing them from using anything other than their own money-in-the-bank voices. It takes one of the best aspects of animation out of the picture, and unintentionally reveals just what a bland, technically unskilled lot we’ve got for A-list talent these days. (Try watching Titan A.E. without knowing who’s in the cast and guess which voice is which.) Luckily, the other characters do have their own distinct voices, from the gruff blather of the pompous ex-R.A.F. Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow) to the blackboard-scratching twitter of the hapless Babs (Jane Horrocks, also an AbFab veteran).

Chicken Run doesn’t have the stunning digital vistas that have become de rigeur in animated features; its plasticine and silicon figures look positively primordial next to Dinosaur’s smooth-skinned beasts. But the Aardman folks take advantage of the winning clumsiness of stop-motion animation by focusing on one of the least graceful species ever to walk the earth; these pear-shaped hens are underdogs from the second they peck their way out of the shell. The gently eccentric tone of Park’s Aardman cartoons has been flattened somewhat, but Chicken Run is its own kind of beast, and a clever one it is, too.