Co-director Nick Park’s work on CREATURE COMFORTS and the three Wallace and Gromit short subjects (A GRAND DAY OUT, THE WRONG TROUSERS, and A CLOSE SHAVE) was marked by a certain intimate quality that relied on facial expressions and reaction shots to generate laughs; this approach was then contrasted with the big set pieces that pulled out all the stops. Co-director Peter Lord, on the other hand, showed a bit more of a tendency for suggesting an epic quality with his previous stop-motion work, and much of that style is in evidence here. It’s not enough to have one or two characters interacting; it has to be a room full of them, just to impress us with the sheer scale of the work. The two styles effectively combine here, creating a clever stop-motion movie with enough spectacle to fill the big screen.

With the exception ofr CREATURE COMFORTS (which was basically interviews with animals discussing their life in the zoo), the earlier work of Park and Lord was not dialogue-driven, generally relying on facial expressions to bring the characters to life. CHICKEN RUN, on the other hand, uses lots of dialogue to tell a feature length story. Much of it is clever, but there is a sense of something having been lost. In earlier Aardman films, there was always a perfect visual punch line for every scene; while story points were being scored, the audience was also laughing along at the inventive gags and imaginative visuals. CHICKEN RUN, conversely, tends to rely on the overall narrative to hold our attention, even when individual scenes aren’t always popping out at us with clever bits of business.

Nevertheless, CHICKEN RUN is a triumph of the stop-motion technique coupled with a fairly sophisticated story that is accessible to children without being childish in tone. Although not up to the level of 1995's masterpiece BABE, CHICKEN RUN begins with the thoroughly horrible death of a chicken named Edwina: it’s not graphically depicted, but the aura of doom is palpable, and it sets the stage for the story that follows, forshadowing what will happen to the other chickens if Ginger’s plans for escape fail.

What seems to be the answer to Ginger’s prayers arrives in the form of Rocky, an American rooster who can supposedly fly. He agrees to teach the others as soon as his broken wing mends, but we in the audience know better. (It turns out Rocky is a circus act, shot from a cannon, who landed by accident in the chicken farm. In one of the film’s many in-jokes, his first word, while sailing through the air, is a long, drawn-out “Frreeedom!” — an echo of Mel Gibson’s role in BRAVEHEART.) The story follows a fairly standard structure: the chickens get their hopes up; then they’re disappointed by the truth; finally, they manage to pull success from the jaws of defeat when Ginger concocts a new plan almost virtually at the last minute. Along the way, familiar imagery emerges that will be recognizable to fans of past Aardman work: for instance, Mrs. Tweedy’s chicken pie machine suggests the sheep mincing machine from A CLOSE SHAVE, and the airborne finale suggests Gromit’s flying scenes from the same film.

It is a pleasant surprise that Ginger, not Rocky, saves the day; although Gibson is the big name star, Ginger is the real protagonist, and the script thankfully lets her succeed instead of relying on the leading man to bail her out (although, to be fair, he does help). This careful attention to characterization is another element that sets CHICKEN RUN above its animated competition. The lead roles are well thought out, and the large supporting cast remains distinct, thanks to some well-defined personalities and voices.

The character designs are not quite as wonderful as one would have hoped (you won’t fall in love with the heroes as you have with Wallace and Gromit, and the villainous Mrs. Tweedy’s doesn’t quite strike fear into the heart with her looks, relying instead on Miranda Richardson’s delivery), but the cast does a great job, and an egg-headed character with a Scottish accent pays off big time with some STAR TREK related jokes when the chickens finally get off the ground.

Long-time fans of Aardman had high hopes for the company's debut feature film. Although CHICKEN RUN is not quite a masterpiece, it is nevertheless filled with inventiveness and imagination, far outdistancing disappointments like JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH. We can be thankful that the company did not simply rush to exploit the Wallace and Gromit characters for their first full-length movie, instead opting for something fresh and new. Fortunately, the results met with resounding critical and financial success, insuring that the long-awaited Wallace and Gromit film would be made.

DVD DETAILS

The CHICKEN RUN DVD is loaded with bonus features, including an informative audio commentary by directors Nick Park and Peter Lord, who provide lots of behind-the-scenes anecdotes and also do an admirable job of crediting the various animators who toiled so hard on specific scenes. There are also two behind-the-scenes featurettes ("Poultry in Motion" and "The Hatching of Chicken Run"), DVD-Rom games, trailers and TV spots, production notes, cast and crew biographies, and a "panic button" (push it and it takes you to a shot of the film's chickens erupting into a panic).

For the kids, there's a read-along-with-the-script feature, which sounds as if it will be a page-by-page copy of the screenplay. In fact, it's a series of still frames (punctuated by brief bits of animation), with the words of a a voice-over narrator subtitled at the bottom, so that children can "read along."

And there are a dozen relatively easy-to-find Easter eggs. Each one reveals some kind of interesting behind-the-scenes fact about the film, such as the amount of plasticine needed to fashion all the stop-motion models.

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