Nick Park’s latest is pretty modest fare – a charmingly conceived entertainment, but a little bit twee
Nick Park and Peter Lord, the creators of Wallace and Gromit, have in concert with DreamWorks and Pathé, turned out their first full-length animated feature, the much-hyped Chicken Run, a sweet and homely little film about chickens escaping from a cruel farmer. It has gained rave reviews from critics in the US who have apparently been credited with calling it “poultry in motion”. (Actually, that’s a line from the film.)
The movie is populated by plump, bell-shaped creatures with what look like inflated washing-up gloves on their heads and eyes stapled to their foreheads, too close together. They are like no chickens you’ve ever seen, but it doesn’t matter. For a brisk and entertaining 80-odd minutes, they scheme to escape their cruel captivity, thankfully not in the modern Britain of horrible factory farming, debeaking, etc, but in a rural Britain closer to the era of Orwell’s Animal Farm, or maybe earlier than that - the film is a cheerful pastiche of the wartime drama The Great Escape, with a feisty American rooster (voiced by Mel Gibson) in the Steve McQueen role.
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Nick Park’s latest is pretty modest fare – a charmingly conceived entertainment, but a little bit tweeNick Park and Peter Lord, the creators of Wallace and Gromit, have in concert with DreamWorks and Pathé, turned out...
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