Take my advice: go see this movie. And stay until all the end credits have run. Then, if it doesn’t reaffirm in you at least a small appreciation for the potential joys of sentient-being-hood, don’t blame me. There’s something seriously wrong with you (unless, perhaps, you’re an adolescent child and therefore capable of criticizing anything – in which case, who let you read a paper with a naked woman on the back cover anyway?). Go get some counseling; you’re dragging the rest of us down. Everybody else, make all your friends go see it, and if they don’t come out beaming like four-year-olds on Christmas morning, find better friends. In fact, anyone who seeks the privilege to vote or drive a car should be required to attend Chicken Run, the first full-length feature from English stop-motion animators Aardman Productions, creators of the Oscar-winning “Wallace and Gromit” shorts. Those who can’t get into the spirit of the thing should be summarily shipped off to McMurdo Bay, Antarctica, to harmlessly ponder their ignorance in apolitical pedestrian exile while the rest of us smile our way on up the evolutionary road.
Co-directed and -written by Aardman founder Peter Lord, who was responsible for the dancing turkeys et al in Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” video, and creative partner Nick Park, whose later arrival heralded the studio’s now-famous signature style (seen in Aardman’s first Oscar-winner, 1990’s “Creature Comforts”), Chicken Run attempts to sustain for 90 minutes the same giddy, painstakingly crafted visual and verbal insanity that makes the three “Wallace and Gromit” adventures favored by pre-adolescent children and enlightened adults alike. Park was inspired equally by brief employment at a poultry-processing plant in his youth and such WWII p.o.w. films as Stalag 17 to come up with the tale of Ginger (voiced by sensible “Absolutely Fabulous” daughter Julia Sawalha), a plucky hen who dreams of freedom for her and the other egg-laying captives of Tweedy’s Farm. She spends the bulk of her non-nesting time like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, planning and executing complex schemes for breaking out, only to be captured at every turn by the oafish Mr. Tweedy (veteran character actor Tony Haygarth), who harbors a nagging suspicion that the chickens are up to something.
Ginger’s preoccupation is tolerated by the rest of the British brood (other voices provided by “AbFab” and Little Voice star Jane Horrocks, and Imelda Staunton from Shakespeare in Love) as harmless until shrewish Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), weary of seeking a profit from the ovivorous public, installs a wondrously nightmarish, Rube Goldbergian pie machine. Suddenly it’s apparent that the only option to entrée is evasion (either of which would be preferable to the horrible fate of the poor clucker in Me, Myself, & Irene, but more about that below). Fortuitously, in drops Rocky (Mel Gibson), a rakish American rooster who collides with a weathervane while flying over the compound. Ginger and pals persuade him to share the secrets of this latent ability and lead them all airborne to an avian Shangri-La before they get the Colonel-Klink-meets-Colonel-Sanders treatment. But the new cock of the walk isn’t everything he seems…
Improvements in computer-generated imagery over the past decade have led to occasional speculation that one day silicon may entirely replace flesh-and-blood at movie casting calls. To which I always say, baloney, you can still spot even the best CGI, like the upcoming Final Fantasy feature, fairly quickly; that’s why James Cameron has for now mothballed his entirely computer-animated drama Avatar. But I could be pretty happy in a world where every single movie star got replaced by one of Aardman’s amazing little plasticine figures. They display all the expression and emotion of the best human actors. And since the images are created photographically – the film took a crew of 250, working simultaneously on 30 sets, two years to complete, with each animator producing only about 2.5 seconds of footage a day -- Chicken Run has a rich, three-dimensional look, like peering into a giant Viewmaster.
Although it’s the first widely released stop-motion feature since Will Vinton’s The Adventures of Mark Twain in 1985, I hope this movie makes Aardman a ton of money. That way we can be sure their new corporate benefactor Dreamworks follows through with backing for a second project, a retelling of “The Tortoise and the Hare” in documentary form, so they can get to what’s planned after that: a full-length “Wallace and Gromit.”
Finally, a reason to live through another election year. A
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