Where nothing in computer animation is real, in stop-motion animation the animators film actual plasticine figures moving across miniature sets–one frame at a time. Each second of film comprises 24 shots, and the creators must make minuscule adjustments to their characters after each click of the shutter to create the illusion of continuous motion.
The masters of this mad, painstaking form are the blokes at Aardman animation studios in Bristol, England. And their star creator–who codirected “Chicken Run” with Aardman founder Peter Lord–is the nearly legendary Nick Park, the 40-year-old adolescent who created the Oscar-winning “Wallace & Gromit” shorts, 30-minute marvels of sophisticated wackiness featuring a soft-spoken suburban inventor and his silent but highly resourceful dog. The first of these, the 23-minute “A Grand Day Out,” Park made entirely by himself. It took him six years to finish it. The $40 million “Chicken Run,” part of a five-picture deal with DreamWorks, employed some 300 people, and still took more than two years to shoot. “It was an entirely different ballgame,” says the thin, soft-spoken, achingly polite Park. “It felt like 20 times, 30 times more work.”
In 1995 Park and Lord were sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and doodling “when somehow this drawing just formed. It was a chicken digging its way out of a coop,” Park says. For both men, having been fans of World War II prison movies “The Great Escape” and “Stalag 17,” the notion for Aardman’s first feature film began to form. “In a way, they were the worst creatures we could have chosen. Chickens have large, round bodies which make them very top-heavy. And they have thin legs, so it’s hard for them to stand up. But it wouldn’t have worked if it was ‘The Great Escape’ with beavers.”
It’s not just the technique that separates “Chicken Run” from its animated competitors. From its quirkily understated British sense of humor to its dark, concentration-camp-inflected imagery, “Chicken Run” doesn’t play by the usual colorful cartoon rules. The prisoners of Tweedy’s Egg Farm have been trying, and failing, to escape for years, led by the indomitable Ginger (the voice of Julia Sawalha, who played the level-headed daughter in “Absolutely Fabulous”). But their efforts take on a new urgency when the pinched, greedy Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), hoping to increase her profits, installs a terrifying chicken-pie-making machine in her farmhouse. Our dotty, baffled-looking heroines now face mass extinction–and in the most astonishing sequence in the film, in which Ginger, clamped upside down by her ankles, is fed to the infernal Rube Goldbergish machine and narrowly escapes baking–the comedy gives us the charred suggestion of hen holocaust.
Hope arrives in the form of Rocky the Flying Rooster (Mel Gibson), a cocky Yank (“I’m the lone free-ranger”) on the lam from a traveling circus. It’s his mission impossible to teach these imperiled chicks to fly. “Chicken Run” is in no hurry to wow us. It starts quietly, introducing its splendid gallery of fowl, rats and humans, then builds and builds until it achieves full comic liftoff.
Can this funky chicken tale compete against its sleek CGI rivals? Isn’t clay a dinosaur form? “It is,” acknowledges Park, “but I think that’s where we score. We’ve got novelty on our side. I’m a great admirer of Pixar and ‘Toy Story.’ And also of ‘Dinosaur.’ But I think already people know you can do anything with computer animation. But it’s just a tool, like clay is a tool. It can only ever be as good as the ideas. The worst thing is if people came out of the theater and said, ‘Nice animation; shame about the movie.”
No danger there. The shame would be to miss this smart, handcrafted charmer.
Chicken RunDreamWorks Opens June 23
