1/14/2025 - Chicken Run review

Hello! I'm back again working through my review backlog. Today is another light one: Chicken Run.

As previously mentioned I have abandoned the idea of numerically ranking things, at least in one concrete number. I may return to numbers if I can solidify a good set of different categories. Onto the review.

Chicken run is a claymation film from the same studio as Wallace and Gromit, this is pretty easy to tell simply based on visual flair, but the humor is also similarly dry. The movie follows a plucky (get it) chicken named ginger who lives in a chicken coup with a group of other chickens. The plot, as you may have guessed, centers around her attempts to escape the coup before any more of her friends are killed. Suddenly, when a circus chicken seemingly flies into the coup, Ginger's escape attempts change.

Chicken run, I am happy to say, is a movie that was clearly made by a passionate team. This makes sense, given how damn time consuming and personal claymation is, but it is always nice to see a movie that was clearly born from a passion and solid idea.  I will also say that it is a surprisingly DARK movie, though no death is shown on screen, chickens are shown being taken into the shed to be killed when they stop laying eggs, and it isn't just minor side characters, named characters also die! I was pretty surprised to see such a dark twist. Though the idea of "farm animal trying to escape" or even the trope of one of them dying to show the severity of the situation isn't new, the topic is usually covered by the fact that the animals don't know they are going to be killed, usually thinking they are going to "x paradise" (this even happens in migration!) while grinning. What I'm trying to say is that is that the trope is usually played off as a joke, while in this movie it is treated as a very real threat to the birds, and something they think about often. They know they will be killed when they stop laying eggs, and even trade eggs amongst themselves to make it appear as if they are all still laying. While I'm prettyyy sure it was intentional, if it wasn't this reads as a major holocaust allegory.

Luckily most of this movie is focused on the escape attempts, though there is very little outright comedy in the hijinks, as I said before, this movie relies heavily on dry wit humor.

MAJOR SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

This movie was a pretty damn fun watch, I really enjoyed pretty much all of the characters and especially that of Ginger and rocky, Fowler was also pretty entertaining. The villian, Mrs. Tweedy was properly intimidating and scary, which was appropriate for the surprisingly serious setting.

I did find it weird that seemingly all chickens were actually highly intelligent, yet also seemingly undetected by humans? Mrs. tweedy makes it clear that the idea of collaborative hens is stupid to mr. Tweedy, yet often they show the two villains finding the inventions of the chickens! I don't know, just felt weird lol. The major conflict of Rocky lying about knowing how to fly was comparatively fine, though boring compared to the rest of the film in my eyes. The final battle/ happy ending was nice, showing tweedy being blown up by the machine was certainly entertaining. Overall, what i found most interesting was the fact that realistically the villains weren't exactly villainous from any perspective other than the chickens - - I mean culling non-layers is fairly standard practice, was the movie criticizing farming livestock? If not I mean it was certainly doing that for me.

The music, again, was alright. I don't remember any standout tracks, it was a good orchestral mix and fit nicely within the scope of this film.

Generally all around this movie was quite ok! I enjoyed it just fine, I may even rewatch it, if nothing else it's a great movie to watch on a first date and then talk about (as I found out first hand) Thanks for reading.