Chicken Run

2000 animated prison break movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A bunch of chickens, led by feisty Ginger, attempt to bust out of Tweedy farms. They fail many times, and things get more critical when the Tweedy decides to abandon attempts to make it with eggs and purchases a giant chicken-pie-making machine. A performing rooster named Rocky flies in and agrees, reluctantly, to teach the chickens to fly.

I love this little movie from the Aardman folk who bring us the Wallace and Gromit movies and not just because it can technically be described as a women's prison movie. Sure I wish they were a little more prolific, but these are labors of love, and the amount of detail that goes into these things makes them magical for children and adults. The details given to the strange looking characters and their odd expressions (I just love how the chickens have teeth in this thing) give them real personalities. The voice work is great in this, especially Tony Haygarth and Miranda Richardson as Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy and Benjamin Whitrow as the lone rooster Fowler. "The turnip's bought it!" and "Don't be ridiculous; I can't fly this contraption!" still makes me laugh. Mel Gibson, the only American voice in this thing, gives a terrific and inspired voice performance in something he could have been tempted to phone in so that he could concentrate on his first love--hating the Jews. The little details in the setting are also nice and give this location that you could easily imagine a Steve McQueen or Paul Newman trying to escape from a little of its own personality. There's so much on the screen to see here; it's so complex for a stop-animation feature. There are scenes where you have an impossible number of chickens making all these impossible-to-coordinate movements, and it's just amazing. Amazing, but I guess not impossible since they pull it off. Things get a little goofy at the end with an action sequence that crosses the line into absurdity and completely ignores the laws of physics, and a lot of people will get a little sick to their stomachs with the terrible puns delivered by a pair of questionable rats. Birds of a feather flop together, it's raining hen, "Dough!', poultry in motion, it's like an oven in here. Uggh. Otherwise, this is well written and clever with more than a few fun references to classic films. It's entertaining for the whole family! This is one of those movies that I have seen about a hundred times, by the way.

Oh, and it reminds me that I have a pirate movie to watch!