Content area
Full Text
Nick Park and Peter Lord, UK, 2000
Good comedies may be scarce as hen's teeth, but there's no scarcity of hen's teeth in Chicken Run. These pullets have choppers. Overbites. Underbites. Vaulted archways between cuspid and incisor. Frittata dentata. Martin Amis' worst nightmare. It's an English thing. And so is Chicken Run.
The first full-length feature from Aardman Animation (released by DreamWorks), this stop-action comedy is also the first poultry-as-POW movie. As such, it owes much more to Nick Park's Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit adventures The Wrong Trousers (93) and A Close Shave (95) than it does to co-director/producer Peter Lord's Oscar-nominated Wat's Pig or Adam. Both use the laborious Aardman animation technique: the elastic makeup of their characters (in this case, courageous-if-addled chickens, evil humans, subhuman dogs) is similar, if distinct.
The humor, however, is pure Park (he and Lord wrote the story, Karey Kirkpatrick the screenplay). The mix of genteel and ludicrous - aka Englishness - imbues the decorous if beleaguered characters with a Powell-Ealing-David Nivenwartime-and-rationing stiff upper lip. Except the stiff upper lip is being worn by a chicken.
Expanding the Park-Lord thing from 30 to 90 minutes was bound to result in at least some thinning of the, shall we say, soup. But once Chicken Run gets over the personal issues of its birds and begins...