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CHICKEN
RUN
5/10
UK
2000
directors : Peter Lord and Nick Park
script : Jack Rosenthal and Karey Kirkpatrick
animated
stars (voices) : Julia Sawalha, Mel Gibson, Miranda Richardson
82 minutes
I've never seen the appeal of Wallace and Gromit - in fact, I'm
not even sure how many Ms and Ts there are in Gromit/Grommit... But even
I was expecting Nick Park's feature debut Chicken Run to be something
different, something special, aimed at adults as well as children. And
I'm afraid to say I was disappointed on all three counts - Chicken
Run will go down best, I reckon, with the uncritical under twelves.
I found it very hard to dislike, but equally hard to build up much enthusiasm
about, and, two weeks on from watching it, I'm not left with many lasting
impressions of the movie - though I'm sure many viewers will find it funnier
and more charming than I did, and I wouldn't dream if putting anybody
off giving it a try.
It's especially disappointing, because, like most British critics, I'd
like to see Chicken Run do well, especially in America, if only
to show the Hollywood studios that they don't have a monopoly on successful
animation. As it is, I'd be pleasantly surprised if the film reaches anything
like the heights of, say, Toy
Story 2 at the US box office, though it looks certain to be a
big hit in the UK, where it has been craftily hyped over the last few
months. I doubt there can be many people left who don't know the plot,
but just in case, the movie is basically The Great Escape done
with chickens, using the painstaking plasticine animation technique that
has provided Park with three Oscars for his shorter works. Organised by
Ginger (Sawalha), the chickens decide to mount an escape bid when they
discover their owner's plans to switch from unprofitable egg production
to pies - which would be very bad news for the birds. American rooster
Rocky (Gibson) falls out of the sky and claims he can teach the chickens
to fly to freedom - but when this idea comes crashing to earth, more ingenious
methods must be devised.
 Chicken
Run was years in the making, and you can see the incredible amount
of patient effort that's gone into virtually every frame . But I ended
up being oppressed rather than impressed by the scale of
the film-maker's accomplishment, the mind-boggling attention to detail
that bringing the movie to the screen must have involved. It seems churlish
to make any criticism of the finished product, but the visibly vast scale
of the effort involved gives Chicken Run a kind of airlessness,
a feeling that the film is too well made, especially in comparison
with the work of the other current major practitioner of stop-motion in
features, the relatively wayward and anarchic Jan Svankmajer, whose 1988
spin on Lewis Carroll, Alice, is streets ahead of anything Park
has yet achieved.
But the main problems I have with Chicken Run are to do with the
script, by Kirkpatrick - whose background is in more conventional American
animated features - and veteran Brit comedy writer Rosenthal. The film's
press notes brag about how many thousands of hours were spent crafting
every shot, but don't tell us how long it took to cobble together the
screenplay that is meant to showcase the animators' talents but instead
holds them back by going for a very conventional, predictable path. There's
nothing drastically wrong with the script, but there's nothing particularly
great about it either - though there are way too many limp puns on the
theme of poultry - and we're light years away from the layered ingenuities
of character development to be found in recent superior animated releases
such as The Iron Giant or the Toy Story sequel. And on a
more general level, I'm not sure that the people behind this movie have
fully thought out its premise. If it is a parody of The Great
Escape, and the allusions are frequent, amusing and unambiguous,
then presumably the film's "baddies", scheming farmowner Mrs Tweedy, her
put-upon husband, and their snarling guard-dogs, are supposed to somehow
parallel the Germans. Which lends a distinctly tasteless edge to the major
plot development in which the farmers take delivery of a huge new mechanised
pie-making machine which includes a gas oven as one of its features.
But perhaps I'm being hyper-critical. The voice-over actors - especially
Sawalha - succeed in creating sympathetic, engaging characters out of
the chickens, and there are many amusing moments and scenes. The
first 15 minutes are, in fact, often hilarious, and the last 15 are as
rousing and satisfying as you could possibly expect. But this is supposed
to be a full-length feature film, and here's hoping Park will learn that
there's a hell of a lot more involved than just a good start and a good
finish.
October
23rd, 2001
(seen
22-Oct-01, UGC Boldon)
by Neil
Young
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