Now, I'm usually adverse to reviewing Disney and Dreamworks because everyone always reviews those when discussing animated movies, but I wanted to review something foreign and this was all i could find on such short notice.
Chicken Run is a claymation (Animated Clay) film done by the very skilled Peter Lord and Nick Park. These guys are VERY talented men from britain and have made many brilliant claymation before hand. Usually they stick to shorts like with Wallace and Grommet, but they still showed their skill with this movie as well.
Chicken Run stars Julia Sawalha as Ginger, a very brave chicken who dreams of escaping from the prison-like chicken coop and saving everyone as well. Mel Gibson plays Rocky, an american rooster who is mistaken for a flying rooster. This is actually one of Mel Gibson's better performances and everyone forgets that before he went crazy, he was a genuinely good actor and has played many interesting characters. Rocky, not a completely original character, but he plays him very well and plays the stereotypical american perfectly.
The movie has a very small cast, but none of them are really important. There's Mrs. & Mr. Tweeny a poor couple that owns the farm and a handful of Chickens that play supporting roles. The Tweenys are alright, but they aren't very complex. Mr. Tweeny is a bumbling farmer who's inherited the farm from a long line of farmers and Mrs Tweeny is a greedy woman who hates how poor she is and wants to make a LOT of money with their farm.
The chickens are as such: Mac, a scientist with a very heavy scottish accent (To all the Scotts, I apologize if that accent is wrong for a Scott), Bunty, a very pessimistic and grumpy chicken who still manages to have some fun with the rest of her chickens, and Babs, who is without a doubt one of the pluckiest chickens I have ever heard (pun intended). She's just so innocent and just says the most hilarious of lines.
There's also Fowler, a military old Rooster who's always strutting about and bragging about how the good old days were so great.
And then there's the rats. Played by Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels. This duo is just brilliant in their chemistry. Playing the roll of a couple of crooked but good-natured businessmen who do deals with Ginger to get her supplies to make her escape hatches.
The plot of the movie goes as such. Mrs. Tweeny is sick of being poor and their egg supplies are getting drastically low. So she decides to turn every chicken around into a pie and sell them. So when Rocky comes in, apparently flying in, Ginger believes that he can save the day by teaching them all how to fly. Rocky can't actually fly and is just a selfish "american" but he proves his metal when he saves Ginger from the pie machine and breaks it down. But once Rocky reveals his secret, he bolts and their left on their own. Ginger, left with no options, decides for one last desperate action: Build a giant plane to fly them out of there.
The movie itself is very well written, with a LOT of good jokes and English-American cross-culture humor. And the end, where they put together all the parts to get the plane up and ready is just spectacular. My only concern is just, with the size of the plane they made, they wouldn't even need to fly really. They could just drive out of their, though the whole joke of the film is that Chickens can't fly.
Another pet peeve I have for the movie, has nothing to do with the movie itself, but with the Tweeny farmers. I've lived on a farm and I know how the business is run, and if the chickens are seriously not giving you eggs three days straight, that's not a problems. And you can't just sell every egg you get either. The chickens are clearly getting too old to mass produce chickens. You need to hold back on your shipment and raise a new batch of chickens to start mass producing more. Heck, even if you want to make a pie farm instead from now on, you don't kill every last chicken at once, you need to get more chickens or else you won't be able to make another batch of pies.
All in all though, the movie is great. the characters are hilarious and every plot detail is revealed at the right moment. A great comedy
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