Chicken Run‘s importance in the field of feature film animation can hardly be overstated. Twenty years ago this week it became the first of Bristol animation studio Aardman’s feature films, proving the financial viability of their signature claymation process for longer projects while also allowing them the resources to venture out into computer animation for Flushed Away (2006) and Arthur Christmas (2011). Like their iconic Wallace & Gromit shorts, which featured the eponymous heroes tackling ridiculously less severe and parodic inversions of Hitchcockian thrillers, Chicken Run is driven by genre conventions that it also satirises. In this case, what would animated chickens do in a war movie?

To approach this head-on genre irony, the film’s animation style must be taken into account. Chicken Run is a film in which objects pop. Thick particles of mud dart around the screen; handmade, tiny household items are manipulated or else crack in fine detail; and giant, hellish machines breathe flames, clattering their great iron jaws near the expressive faces of plasticine chickens. Each meticulously crafted frame is an array of real objects. There is something uniquely tangible and rewarding in just focusing on these things and the visible fingerprints that shift and mutate in each passing frame.

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These extraordinarily detailed clay figures and tangible props allow for a degree of exaggerated movements and scenarios, elevating and giving levity to the movie’s pastiche of the prisoner-of-war subgenre (think The Great Escape, Stalag 17, and The Grand Illusion) – a genre that probably doesn’t spring to mind when you think “children’s film”. However, they are essential to the endearing quality of the movie – earnestly directed by stop-motion veterans Peter Lord and Nick Park. This undeniable appeal is evident in the box office returns, and Chicken Run remains the highest grossing stop-motion animation of all time.  

Aside from this war film resemblance, Chicken Run is a bit like Toy Story (1995) meets Animal Farm (1954). As in the former, the use of miniaturised objects and protagonists is a constant source of comedy; as in the latter, the narrative and overall aesthetic paint a surprisingly dark picture of a contained, anthropomorphised dystopia. In some ways, Aardman gave viewers the antithesis of Pixar’s innovations and success in 3D computer animation: in contrast to these fantastical escapist worlds, there is something uniquely satisfying about something that presented a subversive and slapstick-filtered take on the real world.

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A core aspect of the movie carried over from the sensibilities of Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit series is the act of invention with these physical objects, crucially in the chickens’ attempts to escape from their farm environment. Viewers constantly see things being built and things being broken apart. The appeal of this recreation approaches the self-referential. Indeed, what better medium is there for crafting and destroying objects in cinematic space than claymation? While some aspects of the dialogue and characters may seem a bit trite, the intense and painstaking process of constructing each individual frame provides a chaotic yet lucid physicality that is rarely seen in cinema.

The vivid movement and expressions of the animation give life also to the equally vibrant roster of characters, led by Ginger (Julia Sawalha), the emotional centre and protagonist of the piece. We open with one of her attempts to free the chickens from the captivity that they find themselves in. As the distant crane shot that frames the title card reminds us, this is an isolated and oppressive form of living. The escapes are often innovative and comical but always doomed to failure. Ginger finds it hard to be a chicken and to fly – that is, until a circus-performing Rooster named Rocky (Mel Gibson) lands in their farm.

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The movie finds humour in this already alternately absurd and mundane situation, but the story never loses its dangerous edge. It is the kind of parody that has its cake and eats it too, offering the thrills of its chosen genre in a strange, toybox-like environment. The stop motion animation provides a wonderful sense of verisimilitude, but also inversely a sense of unreality or an alternate world that is more heightened and ridiculous than our own. 

This oddly compelling and effective dichotomy is exemplified in a scene where Rocky rescues Ginger from Mr and Mrs Tweedy’s new chicken pie machine. While unmistakably a piece of technology capable of killing our protagonists in a rather brutal way, the charismatic leads evade danger by plugging a steaming gravy cannon with a carrot, all the while cracking terrible puns and poking fun at the more adventurous aspects of their potential deaths. There is something vaguely Indiana Jones-esque about the procedural nature of these treacherous traps, and the propulsive tracking shots and rapid editing helps to reinforce this. 

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These visual gags are supported by understated, morbidly playful dialogue. Ginger returns to the other chickens and describes the dreadful device, and her fellow chicken Babs absentmindedly delivers one of the film’s evergreen lines, ‘I don’t want to be a pie, I don’t like gravy!’ Other quotes such as, ‘I wasn’t on holiday Babs, I was in solitary confinement,’ and ‘All me life flashed before my eyes; it was really boring,’ are often shared online, so it seems that the many humorous levels of Chicken Run still resonate for many people. 

With that said, there is a more terrifying experience that is given equal weight, and memories of a drab 90 minutes of chicken suffering are not entirely misplaced. In a very early scene it is implied that a chicken is about to be decapitated by the cruel and ominous Tweedys, and later a skeleton confirms this fact. A sense of sombreness and entrapment permeates the film from this early moment, yet this tonal dichotomy is what sells the darkly comic, unorthodox adventure. Like Toy Story and even the war films to which it pays homage, the perverseness of these situations always produces enjoyment: it is something to escape from and to poke fun at. And here, the visual, “prop”-based comedy proves its charm: Babs’ incessant knitting and Rocky’s use of a coat hanger to transform a telephone wire into a zipline read as freeing and imaginative, perhaps not funny in their own right but a complete delight against the death.

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This spirit clearly struck a chord; almost 20 years since the original release, we are getting a sequel. Chicken Run 2 will begin production next year and be released in almost all territories by Netflix. It is clear that both the production team and fans crave an extension of the lives and the world of Ginger and Rocky. By embracing the playfulness of the medium itself, Chicken Run gives its perilous setting of chicken murder an innocence and a nostalgia that we can return to. As we witness the containment of another species from outside, humour faces the harsh reality upon which this perilous existence is based.