Cinema
Chicken Run (U, selected cinemas)
Breaking out
Mark Steyn
I've been a fan of Nick Park, Peter Lord and Aardman Animation since one Sunday ten years ago when, a couple of hundred words short for my weekend TV review for Monday's Independent, I remembered a three-minute filler I'd caught the previous Wednesday afternoon on Channel 4. Wednesday afternoon doesn't really count as weekend prime-time, and Animation On 4 is a series title that would normally chill the blood, conjuring as it does the grim, remorseless output of the National Film Board of Canada and various Soviet satellites, the extinction of whose state-run animation industries was one of the great benefits of the fall of the evil empire.
But this particular Wednesday had been handed over to the Aardman boys for something called Creature Comforts — a mini-masterpiece, as I presciently hailed it, and some months later the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agreed. I can still remember the jaguar with his heavy Brazilian accent, suffused in lugubri- ous scorn as he contemplates the wretched- ness of his exile in Britain: 'Where I would like to live and spend most of my life? In a hot country, you know, in a hot country that I have a good weather, and that I have da space, and that I have trees, you know, and that I don't only have grass with pollen that give me hay fever . . . '
Park had an ingeniously simple idea: record a bunch of vox pops on various sub- jects, find a clay-modelled creature to match the voice, and make a mock-docu- mentary on what animals think about living in a zoo. The jaguar, for example, was actually a Brazilian engineering student, while the gorilla was a melancholic Ulster- man.
Nick Park went on to the Oscars, and Wallace and Gromit. Now he and Aardman founder Peter Lord have teamed up with DreamWorks for their first 'claymation' feature, Chicken Run. Much has been made of how they resisted the demands of conventional Disney/DreamWorks big-time animation — there are no 'Feel The Colours Of My Wind', or whatever the big ballad in Pocahontas was called. Indeed, for a Hollywood feature, it's almost insane- ly British: the chickens sit around the hen- house listening to the Archers theme on an old steam wireless. Most American critics say it's set in the 1950s, but the peculiarly English awfulness it captures is really time- less. The difference between Chicken Run and Disney cuteness is made plain in the first few minutes: the farmer's wife, Mrs Tweedy, seizes a hen who's failed to lay her daily egg and takes her off to the chopping- block. We expect a close shave. But no: the chicken is decapitated, her friends back in the henhouse hear the thud, and, just to underline the point, the next time we see the Tweedys' dining table there's a huge carcase on it.
In other words, the threat isn't just hypo- thetical, and the reasons to break out of the farmyard are very compelling. The tone is old-school war movies like Stalag 17 Hut 17 is where Ginger (voiced by Julie Sawalha) and her fellow chickens, er, hatch their plot. But nothing works until Rocky the Flying Rooster (Mel Gibson) shows up, on the lam from a circus. RAF Wing Com- mander Fowler, the farm's irascible old cock, is unimpressed by Rocky's sudden arrival — bloody Yanks show up late for every war, etc. The girls, though, think he can teach them how to fly. We stray into Music Man territory here: the charming charlatan who has the town in a tizz. 'Keep thinking those flighty thoughts,' he urges them in a line that could come straight from Robert Preston.
For a film that likes to boast about how much it bucks convention, Chicken Run spends a lot of time in poultry remakes of familiar favourites. When Rocky has to res- cue Ginger from Mrs Tweedy's chicken-pie machine, the wild roller-coaster all-action segment pitting the cocksure rooster and the plucky chick against such hazards as mixed vegetables and glutinous gravy owes more than a little to the runaway mine train in Indiana Jones. The claymation real- ly comes alive here, not least in the charac- ters' wildly expressive mouths.
But other stock scenes never quite lift off: when Rocky retunes from The Archers to some hot music to get the henhouse jiv- ing, the claymation choreography is a little tentative and messily shot. A big problem is that it's hard to distinguish the chickens from each other, despite such vocal talents as Imelda Staunton and Jane Horrocks. Animated features are supposed to work at both child and adult level, but Chicken Run doesn't satisfy either demographic: for kids, it's a little dark — not in theme, but in the excessive nocturnal gloom in which the action takes place; for grown-ups, the dia- logue isn't quite snappy enough. On the other hand, I could say the same about most of this month's live-action films. And at least in this POW spoof the Brits get a look in, unlike the forthcoming Colditz movie with Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc. The real chickens are those Hollywood execs who won't allow British characters on screen unless they're poultry.
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