Notwithstanding I am one who never wants to see chickens escape their farmyard concentration camps, I had a good time observing the efforts of all the freedom-seeking fowls in Chicken Run (2000), by the creators of the well-known “Wallace and Gromit”—viz. Peter Lord and Nick Park. 

A family picture, it serves up conventional and wholesome humor as well as clay animation not exactly at its most attractive (I’m thinking of the chickens).  Oh well.  Nearly everything about CR comes off.  Screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick manages the one-liners skillfully.  Consider:  it is a frightful, awful place, this chicken farm, and by and by the fowls find out they are to be ruthlessly transformed into chicken pies.  “I don’t want to be a pie,” blurts out a dumb but sweet chicken called Babs.  “I don’t like gravy.”  Even funnier are many of the nonchalant utterances of Rocky, an American rooster on whom the chickens depend for salvation.  I note that he’s American because all the other animated figures are British, which leads me to an observation:  Emanating from Brits, this picture depicts British know-all and American muscle (Rocky’s), but never American know-how.

Cover of Chicken Run