"Chicken Run"

"Chicken Run" reminds us that the fabled "Yankee ingenuity" is rooted in British ingenuity. Before reading the just-issued "Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie" (Abrams, 2000), I would have called the elaborate pie-making machine a Rube Goldberg creation. But Park and Lord's primary inspiration was a parallel British figure named William Heath Robinson, whose cartoon machines are described as appearing to have been "put together by a resourceful amateur whose construction methods included liberal use of tape and bits of badly knotted string."

The air of a "resourceful amateur" breathes unruly life into all the Aardman group's choices. With them, cleverness and intuition go together, not just in the mechanics but in the characterization and the storytelling. For a split second, you may wonder why the prime villain would be Mrs. Tweedy of Tweedy's Farm and not her husband. But then you realize how right it is for her to be the antagonist of all these fine fluffy heroines -- and how ticklish it is to have the clueless Mr. Tweedy turn out to be multiply henpecked. Beyond that, there's an aura of "Psycho" around the Tweedy house: The missus, when she swings an ax, bears a notable resemblance to Norman Bates' mother.

Of course, Park's three Wallace and Gromit shorts already combined Hitchcockian tension and homegrown whimsy. But in partnership with Lord, Park mixes new ingredients into that combination and sustains the blend for 80 minutes. For example, the Aardman group usually works with people off the street instead of scripted actors, and in Park's most renowned works, Gromit is silent and Wallace is a man of minimum words. But in "Chicken Run," Park and Lord get delicious vocal performances from the likes of Mel Gibson as Rocky, Julie Sawalha as Ginger and Jane Horrocks as Babs.

It's no wonder that Sawalha and Horrocks take to their outrageous tasks like ducks to water or chickens to feed: They're both graduates of the cutting-edge TV comedy "Absolutely Fabulous," in which Sawalha played woebegone daughter Saffron and Horrocks played daffy office assistant Bubble. Indeed, in "Chicken Run," Sawalha's stirring stalwartness and Horrocks' infectious ditziness extend those earlier characterizations. But Gibson gets right into the swing of things, too, with a light and engaging self-mockery beyond the grasp of most action-hero peers. And with Mike Leigh regular Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels of "Quadrophenia" as an Artful and an Artless Dodger who happen to be rats, Lynn Ferguson as bristling-brogued Mac and Imelda Staunton as the disputatious Bunty, the movie delights your ears even as it pops your eyes.

Like all the most innovative comic filmmakers, Park and Lord awaken you to the power of the movie frame and to the vitality of its contents. You get swept up in the bustling barrens of the vast chicken-farm set without ever stopping to think, "What a striking and original conception!" The movie is full of fluky design masterstrokes. Sometimes they relate to character, as in Babs' no-brow facial modeling. Sometimes they detonate gags or story points or both, like the torn circus poster that floats down to Tweedy's Farm and establishes Rocky in Ginger's mind as a flying rooster. By the end, they conjure up a sense of wonder that's both funky and transcendent, with a flying machine that in its own G-rated way reminded me of the R. Crumb rocket powered by millions of Chinese blowing through straws. If you think you won't know where to look first, rest assured that Park and Lord are deft enough directors to guide you. If God is in the details, the Aardman animators have given him a solid base in Bristol.

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