TIME EUROPE
July 10, 2000 VOL. 156 NO. 2
Run, Chicken Run!
The inmates of Hut 17 are planning a great escape. Viewers will get one in this high, wild and hen-some stop-motion adventure
By RICHARD CORLISS
The inmates have tried a dozen ways of escaping from the prison camp. They've attempted bouncing over the barbed wire fence using a hot-water bottle as a trampoline; not enough thrust. They've waddled under the clothes of a giant scarecrow, but the garment ripped and the living pyramid was exposed. They hid under an inverted trough, in a feeder, on an underground tram — nothing worked. After so many failures, the prisoners are getting morose and balky. "We haven't tried not trying to escape," says the cynical Bunty. Babs, her dim friend, nods brightly. "That might work."
Ginger, their plucky leader, is not one to chicken out. Told the chances of escaping are a million to one, she quietly replies, "Then there's still a chance." But she knows she faces longer odds than the pows of Stalag 17 or The Great Escape. Those stalwart lads might have been killed. Ginger and her brood — the chickens of Tweedy's Farm — may get cooked.
Chicken Run, a comedy-romance-adventure, with feathers, is exactly the picker-upper this macho-movie season needs. It's a parable of sisterhood: hens who endure life's drab defeats while hoping and scratching for a break. The film is funny, touching and beautifully understated; its characters win big laughs with the subtlest wrinkle of a brow, earn sobs with a stifled sigh. In a season of nine-figure budgets, the movie was made for chicken feed ($42 million, which it could make back on its U.S. release alone). The movie also boasts an accent that is defiantly English — Yorkshire, to be exact — with a dash of Yank bravado from visiting star Mel Gibson.
And while Hollywood goes mad for techno tricks, directors Nick Park and Peter Lord and their team at Aardman Studios of Bristol, England, are still crafting films by hand. Chicken Run is one of the few features made in the sublimely masochistic form of animation known as stop motion, in which plasticine puppets on miniature film sets must be adjusted 24 times for every second of film. A live-action feature has perhaps 500 shots; this 82-minute movie has 118,080. "The detail is astonishing," says Lord, still in awe of his colleagues' industry 28 years after co-founding the studio. "There must be more man-hours per film frame here than in anything else known to man." The art of the Aardmen and women is to make all that hard work look easy. Viewers don't see the pain; they feel the joy.
Chicken Run is part of a new vitality and variety in what was once called cartooning. "For decades," says film historian John Canemaker, director of the animation program at New York University, "feature animation was dominated by one style: Disney's. Now a diversity of techniques and styles are gaining acceptance. There are computer-animated features, such as Pixar's Toy Story and A Bug's Life. There is clay and/or puppet animation — and because of the artistry of Nick Park and Peter Lord, it is going to grab audiences. We are expanding the definition of the form. It's a brave new world in animation."
The mood is more bleak than brave in Hut 17 on the moor of Tweedy's farm, in the mid-'50s. Mrs. Tweedy, the vicious camp commandant (voiced by Miranda Richardson), and her slow-witted, henpecked husband (Tony Haygarth) have shown her prisoners what happens to a hen who hasn't laid eggs: it becomes a chicken with its head cut off. This fowl existence is driving even Ginger (Julia Sawalha, who played the young Saffy on the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous) close to desperation. Then, out of the sky, a savior drops with a thud. He is Rocky Roads (Gibson), the "flying rooster" from a traveling circus, and he vainly promises to teach the hens — this coop of flighty, flightless birds — how to soar to freedom. But while Rocky the flying churl plays up to "all the beautiful English chicks," Mrs. Tweedy has bigger, nastier plans. She has bought a machine that will turn her chicken stalag into a factory for chicken pies. The prison camp is to be a death camp.
Chicken Run's style and tone will be endearingly familiar to those who have seen Park's Oscar-winning short work. Creature Comforts (1989) had gorillas, bears and hippos speaking the words of human visitors to a zoo, with sad and hilarious results. The trio A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995) were mini-epics starring Wallace, a staid, daft suburban bachelor inventor, and his brilliant, long-suffering dog Gromit — all beautifully suited to the realistic fantasy of stop-motion. "It's three-dimensional," Park says, "a real world, with real texture. But because the characters are made of plasticine, they can bend and change shape. If someone's hit in the face they act like a piece of dough, like a cartoon. We're constantly making it sometimes cartoony, sometimes more gritty."
Park has now adapted to feature length his obsession with the forlorn wit of caged animals, with the quiet exasperation of rural English life — and with bead-eyed, lipless creatures who have more lower teeth (six or eight) than upper (four). These features give his characters a perpetually dazed expression, as if they've been beaten goofy by life's inequities and iniquities. Simply to keep going is an act of heroism.
Park, Lord and screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick stocked Chicken Run with a cross-section of Brit types: Bunty (Imelda Staunton) is bossy. Silly Babs (Jane Horrocks, who played Bubble on Ab Fab) is forever knitting — when she gets morose, she knits a noose. Mac (Lynn Ferguson) is the nearsighted soul of Scottish ingenuity. Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow), a crusty veteran of the R.A.F., says Yanks can't be trusted: "always late for every war. Overpaid, oversexed and ... over here." Edwina, the hen who meets a sharp fate, is based on Edwina Currie, Junior Health Minister in the Thatcher government who declared in 1988 that most egg production in Britain was infected with salmonella; the ensuing ruckus led to her forced resignation.
The hens' lines to the outside world are Nick (Timothy Spall) and Fetcher (Phil Daniels), two music hall Cockney rats — larcenists with a soft streak. As for Ginger, in her green snood and flowery kerchief, she's the born organizer and a bit of a nag — until, one night, she gets a peck on the beak. Rocky says a gentle good-night, and Ginger feels an expected blush of bliss. Her sigh is a bittersweet moment of movie romance.
The plot might seem fanciful, but for Park, who was raised in rural Lancashire, Chicken Run comes close to a childhood memoir. "My family had chickens," he says, "just as pets. They used to come into the porch and eat the food, like a dog really. Or they'd come in the house and steal things. We couldn't bear to eat them; they were characters. Then when I was 16 or 17, I had a job at a chicken-packing factory; we had to fold up plucked chickens and pack them in cellophane trays. I also did a day working in a slaughterhouse — it was horrible. Some of what I saw there did get through to the pie machine in the film."
The pie machine, which Mrs. Tweedy shortsightedly thinks will make her fortune, is in the grand tradition of silly machines from Park's early films: the Victorian spaceship in A Grand Day Out, the trouser robot in The Wrong Trousers, the nefarious Mutton-O-Matic (it turns sheep into dog food) in A Close Shave. These goofily complicated contraptions provide some of the most scintillating action scenes in recent film — Ginger's and Rocky's thrill ride through the pie machine will have viewers gasping with glee — and serve as a metaphor for Aardman's brand of animation.
The arduous Aardman work ethic is poultry in (slow) motion. On Chicken Run, a team of 25 animators toiled to achieve two or three seconds of footage a day, as Lord and Park patrolled the tiny sets like the barons of Brobdingnag. The Bristol shop buzzed with the work of painters, press molders and a gent known as the mouth-and-beak-replacement coordinator. They put in this sweat and out comes a quirky charm. As Park observes: "People say of our films, ÔThey're very charming.' But we don't sit there and say, ÔOh, I think I'll put some charm into this.' It's just what we do, really."
And every few weeks, Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose DreamWorks paid for the film, flew in to offer moral support and to debate the fine points. "Nick and I are English," Lord says. "We don't shout and scream. Whereas Jeffrey says what he thinks immediately and loudly. He wants everything to be argued." Lord finally figured out how to react to the American rooster: "We listen and nod and then go and do our own thing." But Katzenberg did glean a crucial insight. "We now know," he says solemnly, "which came first: the chicken or the egg. We really know." Ever the poker player, he is keeping it a secret — maybe for the sequel?
In any format, live action or animation, good films are as rare as — well, you know. Chicken Run is that rare film that advances the art while bathing the audience in smiles. All it took was three years of mind-bending labor to pullet together.
Reported by Carole Buia/New York and Elizabeth Lea/Bristol
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July 10, 2000
COVER
Run, Chicken Run!
The inmates of Hut 17 are planning a great escape. Viewers will get one in this high, wild and hen-some stop-motion adventure
EUROPE
Are We All Agreed Then?
French President Jacques Chirac chooses the Reichstag to deliver one of the strongest calls yet for an avant-garde core group in the E.U.
Anger Unleashed
A schoolyard mauling stuns Germany into action
Second-Class Kids
Romas in the Czech Republic go to court alleging bias against them in the school system
Greece Hits the Wall
Organizers of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens scramble to recover from their painfully slow start
State of Expectation
Armenians think they may — at last — be on the winning side of history
Democracy Is a Family Affair
Despite the latest French carping, freedom needs a helping hand
AFRICA
Candles in the Wind
Democracy is still the exception rather than the rule in Africa — but there are glimmers of light
Mugabe Feels The Chill
Despite a campaign marked by violence and intimidation, Zimbabweans dare to speak up
A System of Government As Old as the Desert Sands
Talking it up in Botswana
BUSINESS
Funds in the Sun
Tax havens are coming under increasing pressure to clean up money laundering
A New Credit-Card Scam
The latest handheld "skimmers" let crooks use your charge card even as you return it to your wallet
MP3s for the Masses
Having faced down upstart Internet challengers, the record industry gears up for digital distribution
ENVIRONMENT
The Wild Side of Town
Transformed into Europe's biggest urban wetland center, a derelict London site quacks and buzzes with life, luring humans
THE ARTS
The Art of Sexual Vérité
With her shockingly explicit films, French director Catherine Breillat ignites a debate over pornography
Erudite Everyman
Author and literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki manages to get German TV viewers enthralled about books
Truth Sadder Than Fiction
An Aboriginal play about the "stolen generation" lays bare a shameful chapter of Australian history
DEPARTMENTS
Olympic Monitor
World Watch
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