With Shaun the Sheep Movie having dismally collapse in the U.S. but still being one of the most likable and rich children’s movies in years, so let’s keep talking about it – hey everybody, go see Shaun the Sheep Movie – Hit Me with Your Best Shot this week turns towards Aardman Animation’s first feature film, Chicken Run from 2000. I find myself enormously anxious to talk about the whole movie, which I haven’t ever come up with a good reason to review, and shame on me. But that’s not the spirit of this series, and so with enormous reluctance, I will forbid myself from talking about the crafty puns, the impeccable voice casting, the bravery of not only including WWII and Holocaust imagery in a children’s movie about talking chickens but even following through to make those references feel totally earned. And maybe some day I’ll figure out a reason that isn’t transparently arbitrary to write it up in full.
Anyway, the imagery: it is an exemplary feature-length visual reference to an entire genre, the World War II prison camp films (and Stalag 17 & The Great Escape in particular, along with scattered nods to other films; Raiders of the Lost Ark puts in an especially notable appearance. The joke being that all these familiar settings and images are now filled with latex and clay chickens.
The effect this has on the film is twofold. It means that it’s ingeniously funny, and it really never lets up: the absurdity of a genial little English farm with goofy animals, incongruously boasting Aardman’s characteristic teeth in their plasticine beaks, all inhabiting the exact world of tough-minded adult action films is a bit more snarky than Aardman’s usual sense of humor, the influence perhaps of distributor and co-financier DreamWorks Animation SKG (though this was before DWA had gone all-in on sarcasm; Shrek was still a year away). At the same time, the whole joke is a very generic movie given a loopy facelift through clay poultry, so on a shot-by-shot basis, almost nothing in Chicken Run is creative and beautiful as-such; all of the shots look trite and common because they’re supposed to be trite and common.
It makes it tricky to pick a best shot, but I think I’ve managed:
So you can see, I assume, what I’m talking about in terms of the content and framing of this shot being rather conventional, save for the chickenification of it. Which is no sin, of course; it’s a shot type that shows up often because it works very well at communicating a certain emotion.
And this certainly does that beautifully well. The three-tiered composition is elegant as it is straightforward: the two main characters in the foreground, Ginger (Julia Sawalha) and Rocky (Mel Gibson) are noticeably elevated above the field of chicken coops, connected more with the distant horizon and the soothing calmness of the blue sky and the lighter blue clouds. It’s a yearning moment, with the ugly closeness of the coops – a clear-cut reference to POW camps – ceding space to clear open air as our eyes move upward to the top of the frame, for that is very much the way our vision has been directed by the composition (all those lines on the roofs!). It’s not clever, but it doesn’t have to be: it’s a direct and elemental depiction of the theme of the movie: the desire to escape imprisonment and punishment, the idealisation of of the world one wants to escape to, and the comfortable familiarity of spending a quiet moment with the ones who you want to escape with.
Plus, it’s silly, you see. It’s got chickens in. But chickens who feel greatly human, bubbly silliness and all.