Chicken Run (2000) Review

Official trailer

The Great Escape With Chickens

Chicken Run is The Great Escape with chickens, and it’s every bit as good as that sounds. It takes the prisoner-of-war film, the escape committee, the tunnels, the searchlights, the guard dogs and the commandant, and moves all of it to a grim egg farm in Yorkshire, where the prisoners are hens and the punishment for failing to lay is the chop. I love Aardman, and this is their best feature.

Peter Lord and Nick Park directed it, after Park’s Wallace and Gromit shorts had made the Bristol studio famous around the world. It came out in 2000 as a co-production with DreamWorks, and it became the most successful stop-motion film ever made, a record it still holds. I give it a 9, and it’s one of the few family films I’d happily watch without a child in the room.

The Coal Bin

The film opens with a montage of Ginger’s failed escape attempts. She digs, she disguises herself, she hides in a feed sack and she tunnels, and every attempt ends the same way: Mr Tweedy, the dim farmer, carries her back and throws her into the coal bin for a spell in solitary confinement. Inside, she bounces a ball against the wall while she plans the next attempt, exactly as Steve McQueen did in the cooler in The Great Escape.

The film never pretends the reference is subtle, and it doesn’t need to. In two minutes it has told you that this is a prison film, that Ginger is the one who won’t give up and the jokes will be dry. It also establishes the stakes quickly and plainly: hens that stop laying are killed, and one of them is taken to the chopping block in the first ten minutes.

Ginger’s bouncing ball, thrown against the coal bin wall while she waits out her sentence, is a straight homage to Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. It wins me over on the spot, because the film plays the joke completely straight and trusts you to get it. The ball is the first of dozens of loving nods, and it tells film fans exactly what they’re in for.

Ginger

Ginger is one of the great animated heroines: a hen who refuses to accept that dying for eggs is normal, and who keeps trying to convince everyone else to refuse it too. She’s frustrated, stubborn, sometimes wrong and often exhausted, and the film lets her shoulder the weight of leadership without making her superhuman.

Julia Sawalha voices her with a no-nonsense Northern determination that suits her perfectly. Ginger’s problem is getting a coop full of hens who have never known anything else to believe that there’s a life beyond the wire. That’s a much more interesting problem, and it makes her a much more interesting hero.

She’s also the only one who can see the bigger picture. The others worry about laying enough eggs. Ginger understands that the eggs don’t matter, because the whole system ends the same way for every chicken in it. That clarity makes her both heroic and very lonely.

Mrs Tweedy

Mrs Tweedy runs the farm, and she’s terrifying because she’s so ordinary. She’s a hard-faced farm businesswoman in a headscarf who looks at chickens and sees only profit, and when egg production stops making enough money, she buys a machine that will turn them into pies instead.

Miranda Richardson makes her villainy entirely matter-of-fact. That’s what makes it frightening. There’s no cackling, no grand plan. She simply does the sums. Mr Tweedy, her dim husband, is convinced the chickens are organized and planning an escape, and nobody believes him, least of all his wife. That running joke pays off beautifully, and Tony Haygarth’s slow, suspicious farmer is a gem.

The contrast between the two is a lovely comic engine.

Mr Tweedy is right, and nobody believes him. Mrs Tweedy is wrong about almost everything except the money, and she’s the one in charge. I find her scarier than most villains with fangs or lasers, because nothing about her is exaggerated except the pie machine.

Rocky

Rocky the Rhode Island Red crashes into the farm by flying over the fence, fired from a circus cannon, with an injured wing. The hens see him arrive through the air and believe he can fly, and Ginger strikes a deal: he’ll teach them, and they’ll hide him from the circus owners who want him back.

He can’t fly, of course. He spends half the film faking flying lessons and hiding the truth, and Mel Gibson plays him as a brash American charmer who’s far more frightened than he looks. The moment the hens discover the truth, from a circus poster, is the film’s emotional low point. His return, when he finally chooses to stay and help, is earned, and his growing respect for Ginger gives the film its romance.

Rocky’s arc is the familiar one of a braggart finding his courage. The film handles it well. His return to the farm, arriving at exactly the right moment, is a crowd-pleasing beat. The film earns it by letting him fail first.

The Supporting Hens

Babs knits through everything, including what looks like the end of the world, and has a gift for missing what matters that Jane Horrocks makes irresistible. Bunty is a large, skeptical hen who has laid more eggs than anyone and doesn’t believe in escape. Mac is a Scottish engineer who works out the technical side of every plan in an accent nobody can follow.

Each of them is a clear, funny character in a few lines, and each gets a moment in the finale. Aardman’s great skill is making a crowd of near-identical plasticine hens into distinct personalities, through a voice, a posture or a single running joke, and it’s never been better than here. Imelda Staunton voices Bunty and Lynn Ferguson voices Mac, the coop’s resident engineer, whose thick Scottish accent and technical jargon are a running joke. Between them, the hens feel like a real community, bickering and loyal in the way people are.

Nick and Fetcher

The two rats, voiced by Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels, are black marketeers who supply the hens with smuggled goods in exchange for eggs. They bicker constantly, try to cheat the chickens at every turn and talk in the patter of old London spivs. They’re a double act in the tradition of British comedy, and they get many of the best lines.

They also turn out to be useful when the escape needs parts, and their grudging loyalty to the hens by the end is one of the film’s small pleasures. In a prison film, the smugglers are always essential, and Chicken Run knows its genre well enough to give them their due.

The Pie Machine

When Ginger and Rocky end up inside Mrs Tweedy’s pie machine, the film becomes a proper action sequence. Conveyor belts, rolling pins, chopping blades, gravy nozzles, a pastry press and an oven at the end of the line: every hazard is a kitchen tool scaled up to terrify, and the pair survive by timing, luck and teamwork.

It builds a whole set piece out of one idea and keeps escalating until something breaks, and it plays like the mine cart chase in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The animators clearly adored that film. I think it’s the best action sequence Aardman ever animated, and I’d put that gravy nozzle up against anything Spielberg shot in his mine. It’s the scene everyone remembers, and it shows the hens, and the audience, exactly what the stakes are.

The sequence is also the moment the stakes become brutally clear. Up to this point, the danger has been an idea. Inside the machine, the film shows the chickens exactly what Mrs Tweedy plans for them. The effect is horrifying and hilarious at once.

Fowler and the Crate

The old rooster Fowler has been boring everyone for years with his stories about serving with the Royal Air Force, and the hens roll their eyes every time he starts. When Ginger decides the only way out is to fly, the hens build an airplane out of scrap in the hut, following Fowler’s memories of RAF aircraft. Then it turns out his stories were about being a mascot, not a pilot.

In the final act, he takes the controls of the Crate anyway, and gets them over the fence. It’s a small arc, beautifully handled, about an old man finally getting to be what he always said he was. The flight itself, with Ginger and Rocky dangling from the plane on a string of fairy lights, fighting Mrs Tweedy in mid-air, is as exciting as any live-action climax.

The escape depends on the one character everyone has dismissed. Fowler’s endless war stories were true in spirit, if not in detail, and when the moment comes, he’s the one who knows what to do.

The Hand of the Animator

Principal photography on Chicken Run ran about seventeen months, with dozens of animators working on separate sets at the same time, each moving plasticine chickens a fraction of an inch between frames. The fingerprints on the models, the slightly wobbly edges and the tactile, handmade quality are part of the look, and they’re part of why it feels warm.

The score, by John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams, plays it all like a Second World War film, with marching brass and heroic themes, and it works beautifully. The lighting, with searchlights sweeping the yard at night, belongs in a real prison film. Nothing about Chicken Run looks mass-produced. It’s still the highest-grossing stop-motion film ever made.

A Very British Film

The jokes are dry and small, and they’re very British. The hens knit, fuss about tea, worry about their figures and talk about the weather while plotting a mass breakout.

Nobody raises their voice unless they have to. The whole film is about keeping calm and making do while everything goes wrong, a national ideal filtered through a coop full of chickens.

That’s part of why it translated so well. American audiences recognized the war film structure, British audiences recognized the characters, and everyone recognized the jokes. DreamWorks had the sense to leave Aardman alone, and the film never feels as if it has been sanded down for an international market.

It’s also a film about work. The hens are workers whose employer measures their output, punishes their failures and sees them only as a cost. That reading is never pushed, but it’s there, and it gives the comedy an edge that lasts long after the jokes about knitting have faded.

Where does Chicken Run (2000) fall short?

It’s a little slow in its middle stretch, where Rocky’s flying lessons repeat the same joke a few times too many, and the romance between Ginger and Rocky is sweet more than it is involving. Mel Gibson’s voice work is good, though Rocky is the least interesting of the main characters.

None of that touches the core. The structure is perfect, the villain is frightening, the pie machine is a masterpiece and the finale is thrilling. It’s a 9, and on a good day, watching the Crate lift over the fence with the whole coop aboard, I’d be tempted to give it more.

The Sequel

Sam Fell directed Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, which came out on Netflix in 2023 with a new voice cast. That’s a pleasant enough film about Ginger and Rocky’s daughter and a sinister new factory, and it has some good gags. It isn’t in the same league as the original. The original had the advantage of a borrowed structure everyone recognized and a real sense that the stakes were life and death.

Watch the original first, and if you want more of the same world, the sequel will do for a rainy afternoon. The original is the one that will still be watched in fifty years, because its borrowed structure, its sharp characters and its handmade warmth are the kind of thing that doesn’t date.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Chicken Run

Absolutely. It’s a 9, charming for children and very funny for adults, and the pie machine alone is worth the price. The only thing keeping it off a 10 for me is that saggy stretch of flying lessons in the middle, and I’ll forgive a lot for a film that has me cheering for a knitting hen.

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