Chicken Run

From 2000, Chicken Run was the first feature-length film from Aardman Productions, best known for Nick Park's wonderful "Wallace and Gromit" films. A charming, if slight, tale, it's sure to please fans of World War II P.O.W. movies and vegetarians alike.

Set on the Tweedy farm somewhere in England, the hens live in a precarious situation. Thankfully, at the outset, it's strictly an egg farm, but if a hen's production drops off, she becomes the Tweedy's dinner.

One of the hens, Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha) yearns to break free of the farm. She attempts escape several times, but Mr. Tweedy, though not very bright, always manages to catch her, and throw her into solitary (we get one reference to The Great Escape by her enduring her imprisonment throwing a ball against a wall).

She's just about given up hope when a cocky rooster (redundant?) voiced by Mel Gibson arrives. Ginger thinks he can fly, and hopes that he will teach them to fly over the fence and to freedom. This becomes even more imperative when the diabolical Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) decides that the sluggish profit of eggs can be multiplied by a huge machine that will turn her fowl into chicken pot pies.

Chicken Run is fun without being brilliant, and is not as good as the Wallace and Gromit feature. It's still amazing to look at the claymation techniques and not be amazed about how much work went into it, and chickens, let's face it, are inherently funny. Most of the humor is droll and not laugh-out-loud, such as the hen coop having the number "17" scrawled on it (certainly a reference to another P.O.W. film, Stalag 17).

It is weird to see Mel Gibson in the DVD extras and remember there was a time when he was thought of as a genial movie star and not a nut.