Chicken Run
Directed by Nick Park and Peter Lord. 2000. Ages 6+. 84 min.
- Sat, Nov 22, 2:00 pm
“It has become such a cliché to describe a certain kind of middle-class Englishwoman as a clucking hen that when the clucking hens in Chicken Run open their beaks and out come the voices of middle-class Englishwomen—well, it feels so right you'll want to cock-a-doodle-doo. The farm on which the hens live is like a German prisoner-of-war camp, and when their egg output drops, they're snatched away and roasted. The idea of remounting a Nazi prison-break movie (cf, The Great Escape [1963]) with bourgeois, complacent female poultry might not seem so promising—and this is a grim setting for a kiddie movie. But this first feature by Nick Park and Peter Lord, the team that brought you Wallace and Gromit, is a diabolically witty piece of work, a haymaker. Each chicken is a miracle of characterization, and the tour-de-force sequence—in which the heroine and the Yank hero (Mel Gibson, never funnier) fight to stay in one piece in a pie-making machine with more wheels, cogs, and pulleys than Rube Goldberg's worst nightmare—surpasses Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) for sheer kinetic marvelousness. Two wise-ass mice call the hen's pathetic attempts to fly "poultry in motion," but the movie is poetry in motion: It's eggsquisite.” (David Edelstein, Slate.com)