Chicken Run (2000)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Chicken Run I have always enjoyed Claymation films and this movie is no exception. I appreciate the time and effort it took to make every scene of this movie. You must give the creators and artists credit for the love they must have had for this movie to be able to create this. One thing that I loved about this movie was how well sound was used. The sounds gave a very realistic feel to the film when in actuality it was a cartoon with a pretty unrealistic premise. I also thought the voice acting was very good and fit in well with the Claymation characters. This provided a good flow to the film. One thing that was very prominent in the film was cutting for continuity. One example of this is when Mr. Tweedy was building the pie machine. The film would cut to different parts of him building and repairing it to show the passage of time without taking time from the story that could be used elsewhere. I enjoyed the premise of the story too. It is very original and when it came out it had not been used very often. When I first watched this film when I was very young enjoyed its comedic elements and fast paced story. Watching it no, as an adult, I enjoy the humor of the jokes and many of the dramatic aspects that I did not quite pick up on as a child. I found that the fast paced story was very easy to follow but and kept the audience entertained, but it was not too fast as to feel rushed and incomplete. Chicken Run had a very Classical Paradigm in that its structure was very simple. This structure is very common in fiction movies and this is prime example. The story follows from the intro and introducing the film through the plot and finally to the climax and closing. One of my favorite scenes was when Rocky was in the pie making machine. In this scene a lot is going on. There is so much motion going on that you would think that you would become distracted and lose focus on the point but because of how it was filmed your eye is always drawn to Rocky and what he is doing. The story of this film may also be paralleled to the concentration camps of World War 2. The chickens representing the Jews and other captives and the Tweedys representing the Nazi's. As the chickens realize that the end is near they must find a way to escape from their oppressors. I believe that what the chickens felt during this film can be paralleled with the feelings of many of those who perished in the camps.

The beginning of the film strongly sets the tone of the rest of the film. Using the first escape attempt to show that the situation of Ginger and her friends as effectively hopeless. While I could see it being argued that the opening montages are supposed to just instill in us the great idea of hope that they all have. However the way the depict the entire setting shows me that we are to believe that hope is futile and escape is impossible. The very opening shot shows us a very literal prison camp. Anyone who did not know what they were going to watch would be surprised to find out that the grounds with barbed wire, rows of cabins, and a guard with terrifying dogs under the moonlight is actually just a chicken farm, and this lends to the comedic effect in a way but more importantly leaves you with a clear message: leaving is impossible. This gets enforced by the very entertaining montage of escape attempts that follow. The clever use of comedy to distract from the underlying hopelessness the characters face is masterfully done. The best part comes at the end of the first montage when the comedy fades. Suddenly nothing is funny, and a friend of theirs dies as is normal around there. Nothing has changed. For a moment there just isn't something funny to distract you from the gravity of the situation and it is very masterfully done. The introduction of the character Rocky is both one of my favorite and least favorite moments of the movie. His arrival and the belief of the other chickens that he can fly leads the characters to have hope that as an audience we know is pointless. The chickens believe their situation has changed entirely, but we as an audience know that chickens can't fly and that they have false hope. This works to enforce the previously established message: Escape is impossible. But more importantly it raises tensions. As an audience it is in our nature to root for the protagonist so it causes a kind of stress to work towards something they won't achieve for such a long portion of the movie especially with an approaching deadline of sorts. we are left wondering "How will they escape?" because we desperately want to believe that they can and will escape. This build in tension is wonderful and effective, but is also slow taking roughly half the time of the movie in total. When it reaches its peak during Ginger and Rocky's escape scene within the pie machine we are left in a rift of sorts. With Rocky having left the next morning and all the chickens fighting we are feeling the same hopelessness as Ginger in that moment where we question if they can actually escape. And then my favorite part of the film is the race that follows. After all the previous tension built and was released we are now faced with this race against the clock. It has the same effect as the previous tension building section but occuring in a third of the time. And more importantly unlike the beginning of the film most of this new plan of the chickens being carried out occurred in sunlight filling the scene with bright colors and hope drawing on the power of mise-en-scène to affect how we perceive the events. And of course from there the film follows the usual steps of any classical story with a climax, etc. Now I mentioned that Rocky's appearance in the film also highlighted my least favorite aspect of the film, and that aspect is an out of place romance. The character of Rocky is a typical masculine roll in charge, aloof, and confident. He is also uncomfortable with how assertive and in charge Ginger prefers to be. This is an archaic trope for films to have an in charge female character who will be "Tamed" and/or "put in her place" by a man and somehow that is romance. I won't fault Chicken Run for including the specific trope it is nearly twenty years old now however having a romance in general feels like a mistake. It was out of place with all the other themes. Missing the necessary elements to be a romantic comedy which requires the focus of the film to be on the two romanticized characters. It also seems contrary with the characterization and actions of the character himself. Rocky having done a lot of wrong and a little right came far from redeeming himself completely, and it all ended with a romance that felt wedged in between other great movie elements.Overall Chicken Run is a wonderfully hilarious comedy borrowing elements from other serious movies like any other comedy but comes with unique ability to apply them effectively but is still not free from the film pitfall that all movies must contain the elements of a heteronormative romance.

Chicken Run (2000)Plot In A Paragraph: Set in Yorkshire, England in 1950's. A bunch of chickens are facing certain death on the Tweedy's Chicken Farm. They constantly try to escape, but always fail. When an American Rooster named Rocky (Gibson) falls into their farm, they are given new hope. This movie seems to have been forgot about over the years, but these days I'd rather watch something original like this, than sit through endless car chases and shoot outs held together by a dim witted plot in another Fast & Furious movie.I really like this movie, it is funny, clever, sweet, tender and touching. It's not just about hitting a few plot points to get to the big escape!! It surprisingly has a decent amount of character development, and at the end I knew if had a good time. Chicken Run was another $100 million grosser for Gibson, as it ended the year with $106 million at the domestic box office to finish the year as the 20th highest grossing movie of 2000.

Filmed entirely using Claymation technology (the same style used for the Wallace and Gromit animations), gave Chicken Run a different feel to your usual animated movie. The animation certainly isn't to everybody's taste, it doesn't look as impressive or as polished as standard animation but for me it wasn't a problem, within a few minutes I was completely used to it and barely noticed it to be different from then on.An almost all English cast worked well for the movie with the only American being Mel Gibson, playing Rocky the Rooster. This created the opportunity for the chickens to look up to the Rooster as some sort of celebrity, a foreigner who was like something they had never seen before.There are many references to great British movies through the film, some of which I picked up on and others which I have read of since watching it. Chicken Run does have a strong British feel to it, however I can't help but feel that just the inclusion of one American character made it feel a little too American. Mel Gibson stood out like a sore thumb, now I'm not saying he didn't fit the part and play a vital role, I just think that some of the jokes and amateur dramatics would have been better suited to the movie if they were a little less Americanized.On the most part the comedy is fresh and I found myself laughing on several occasions. It's a feel good flick; it's as simple as that. Its relatively predictable and plays out containing all the clichés you would expect from a movie of this genre. Overall, It isn't a perfect movie and I don't feel it contains any real wow factor and it misses the mark on any real emotion in my opinion. However the casting is done well enough, the jokes hit the mark on the most part, the animation is impressive when you consider the effort it must have taken to produce it and it is a decent way to pass the time on a rainy Sunday Afternoon, as I did.8/10