Chicken Run (2000) Review

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 the whole thing 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

Ginger is one of the great animated heroines, and she isn’t a princess. She’s 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 carry 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 isn’t finding the courage to escape. It’s 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.

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 organised 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.

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.

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, sceptical 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.

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’s a masterclass in building a set piece out of one idea and escalating it until something breaks. It plays like the mine cart chase in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The animators clearly adored that film. It’s the scene everyone remembers. It also shows the hens, and the audience, exactly what the stakes are.

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 aeroplane 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 Hand of the Animator

Chicken Run took around three years to shoot, 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 the whole thing 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 recognised the war film structure, British audiences recognised the characters, and everyone recognised 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 output is measured, whose failures are punished and whose employer 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 Chicken Run Falls 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

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget came out on Netflix in 2023, directed by Sam Fell, 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. It had the advantage of a borrowed structure everyone recognised and a genuine 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. It’s Aardman at their best, and one of the finest animated films of its decade.

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