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Synopsis: Tweedy's chicken farm is a dire place. It looks like a concentration camp, with barbed wire and vicious patrol dogs. If egg production falls, it's the chopping block for the chickens. One chicken, Ginger, has had enough. She dreams of freedom. The first five minutes of the film document several failed attempts at escape, each resulting in a stint in solitary confinement in the coal bin for Ginger (she bounces a turnip against the wall like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape). She could escape by herself if she wanted, but she won't leave her friends behind. Things become desperate when Mrs. Tweedy, tired of a subsistence living from egg farming, decides to buy a pie machine. Our feathered heroines are suddenly faced with mass extinction. Help seems to drop into their laps with the arrival of Rocky, a cocky Rhode Island Red, who promises to teach them all to fly. Of course, chickens CAN'T fly, but that doesn't stop them from dreaming. And at the end of the movie, they DO fly after a fashion.

The very notion of setting The Great Escape in a chicken farm is funny by itself, but when you mix in elements from every prison or POW movie you have ever seen, the whole concept comes to delirious life. I knew I was in for a good time when I saw that the central chicken hutch was "Hut 17." Some of the images that Park and Lord put on the screen are simply amazing. The sequence when Rocky rescues Ginger from the bowels of the pie machine is worthy of the great silent comedians (think Modern Times crossed with Steamboat Bill, Jr., or Raiders of the Lost Ark, for that matter). The scene when Mr. Tweedy finally catches the chickens red handed ("I tell you they're oop to sumthin'. They're oorrr-ganized.") is almost as good, recalling some of the better Far Side cartoons. But even though Chicken Run echoes pop culture sources of all kinds, it remains essentially itself. There have never been chickens that look like this, with their expressive bug eyes and mouths full of toothy slabs, but they act like chickens and we are told that they are chickens, so chickens they are. The personalities of the chickens are drawn more sharply than most live action movies, with vocal performances that match the characters precisely. Julia Sawalha gives Ginger the perfect mix of sense and sensibility. Mel Gibson lets go of his own image and provides Rocky with a nervous vocal swagger to match the visual image. Miranda Richardson's vocals for Mrs. Tweedy are part Wicked Witch of the West, part Norman Bates's mum (Richardson, it seems, is fast becoming everyone's favorite choice for wicked step-mothery-type roles).

Between them, Nick Parks and Peter Lord have six Academy Award nominations and three statues. Park's Wallace and Grommit are the first really great cartoon characters to appear since the heyday of the Warner Brothers. Peter Lord's music video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" is still the best music video ever made. So why aren't these guys better known? Well, they are British, and big Hollywood studios leave British films to the indies and the arthouse crowd. Until now, that is. Chicken Run is the first feature from Aardman Animation, the animation studio founded by Park and Lord, with five more in the pipe. In a summer choked with new animation, Chicken Run is a standout. Other animation studios are ruthlessly pushing the technological envelope; Chicken Run stands as a quiet protest. Made entirely by hand, Chicken Run has the love and care of craftsmen rather than the input of technicians. It relys on old-fashioned virtues like story, character, and charm rather than razzle dazzle. And by the end of the movie, the audience realizes that they have been dazzled in spite of themselves.  If Chicken Run is any indication of what is to come, there may very well be a new ruler of the roost in animation, because Chicken Run is a pure delight from start to finish.