LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Chicken Run
built 198 days ago
![[box cover]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/c/h/i/chicken-run/i/000.jpg)
Lord and Park admit that Chicken Run is an amusing take-off on The Great Escape. In this case, though, the detainees are chickens on a British chicken farm. Led by the indefatigable Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha, the daughter on Absolutely Fabulous), the all-too-passive hens attempt many breakouts that only end in failure, hounded by hounds and rounded up by Mr. Tweedy (Tony Hagarth), who throws Ginger into the film's version of a prison-camp cooler (containing an elaborate visual pun that Park and Lord explain on their audio commentary). There Ginger passes the time like a fowl Steve McQueen.
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Unlike most cartoon films, "Chicken Run" is animated using clay figures in stop-motion. While this process involves much more labor than drawn animation, it ... makes easier the use of many of the tools of live-action filmmaking, such as dramatic lighting and moving camera work. Directors Peter Lord and Nick Park both have considerable experience in this field, Park with "Creature Comforts" and the "Wallace & Gromit" series (perhaps the most popular animated shorts of the 1990's) and Lord as a co-founder (with David Sproxton) of Aardman and director of such shorts as "Adam", "Wat's Pig", and "Early Bird".
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On the surface, Chicken Run might strike some viewers as pedestrian. But in practice what Park and company have done is to infuse their story with verbal wit and endearing characters. And the story isn't all banalities: early in the film the viewer is given a dose of reality. A chicken named Edwina is killed by Mrs. Tweedy for failing her egg-production quota. The actual hazards of such a farm are ... kept always in the forefront of the viewer's mind, creating a climate of dread within the frivolity.
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Chicken Run is not really about chickens. Its creators, claymation masters Nick Park (creator of the Oscar-winning Wallace and Gromit shorts The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave) and Peter Lord, have described their protagonists as "people in chicken suits." By this they meant that, having studied actual chickens in an effort to glean some inspiration for their animated characters, they ultimately concluded that real chickens had too many peculiar mannerisms (such as bobbing their heads as they walk) that wouldn’t work well with their medium, and so abandoned any pretense of naturalism, animating the chickens essentially as they would any other characters. But it is equally true that the anthropomorphic birds of Chicken Run are human in more ways than one — indeed, they are much more human than many characters portrayed by flesh-and-blood actors in many live-action films.
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Chicken Run's visual production, on the other hand, is quite nice. The models are reasonably solid, and during the cutscenes, they're as well animated as could be expected. The game's textures are fairly solid, and the environments are moderately detailed. The game's voice work is rather good, which is not surprising, given the game's movie-licensed nature. Music is sparse in most areas and nigh unnoticeable in others. Neither case serves as a testament to the sound's thoughtful conception, and the unimpressive sound effects do nothing to redeem the overall audio production.
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Based on the new Claymation film from the makers of the popular Wallace and Gromit series, Chicken Run is a touching, offbeat story of a hen house full of plucky chickens who exhibit admirable courage in the face of daunting odds. Humorous and irreverent (budding vegetarians will love this story of chickens refusing to become meals for humans), the book takes readers on a wild, imaginative ride of near misses, tender romance, and nerve-wracking adventure.
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Chicken Run