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Chicken Run

Chicken Run

List Price: $19.99
Your Price: $16.39
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Coop 17
Review: The chickens of Coop 17 long for a better life and have been trying to find a way out of the Tweedy's farm for some time, but when rhey finally have an escape plan, Mrs. Tweedy decides it is time to turn the entire flock into chicken pies.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Stunning- Wallace and Gromit it IS!
Review: Such an amazing movie, I can't wait for their Tortoise and the Hare and then Wallace and Gromit the Movie. This movie is fun for the whole family, REALLY! It's got jokes for the kids, and jokes that only adults will get, and top quality animation is a plus!

I watched this film with my mom, the first time I saw it (at the age of 20) and immediately fell in love with the characters.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: one of the best
Review: you know a movie is great when you can laugh even though you are in a depressed mood, which happened last weekend when i rented this to watch it. i love it. the characters are wonderful, and just the idea that chickens think they can fly and try to fly shows the intellingence of chickens is hillarious. maybe the idea at the end of creating a large bird to fly out was a little too ingenious for chickens, but who cares, it was a roaring good time.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Top 10 movie of the year to many critics
Review: This movie is a lot of fun, and very similar humor to the Wallace & Grommet shorts. Fans of "Absolutely Fabulous" will recognize the main chicken (Saphron from Ab Fab) and the air-headed chicken (Bubbles from Ab Fab--how appropriate!). Very witty British humor, and humorous animation style throughout. You will want to watch it again the next day after seeing it. Tons of extra features. Adults will probably find this funnier than younger viewers, who will probably be wrapped up in the storyline alone.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: very funny
Review: I can't believe I loved this kind of animation. Usually, I hated this kind of animations as I am used to more disney kind of animations.

The story is so funny, interesting and adventurous. The animations so 3-D like and real. I had to force to get some of my friends to see this one and after seeing they loved it so much that they want to see all the animations in my collection.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: chicken run
Review: I rented the movie because we had enjoyed wallace and gromit so much. My eight year old and I watched it last night and busted a gut laughing. The characters we're so cute and funny that I can't even think of eating chicken for a while. Great story line and lots of great humor that children and adults will enjoy for a long time. It's a keeper. Hats off to the creators.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Clever, fun, entertaining! Good family stuff.
Review: While the youngest kids might not understand the story line, everyone else should get a real kick out of this outstanding claymation film from the Brits. The great thing about it is that you will enjoy watching it more than one time. Not too sophisticated for pre-teens, not too simple for adults - it's just the right mix of cartoon plot and clever humor. Of course, we adults have to summon up the little kid in us in order to actually buy into the silliness of chickens plotting a way to escape the coop. But, hey, haven't we suppressed that little kid long enough? Get this movie, kick back, snuggle up with your six-year-old on the couch, believe, and watch chickens fly!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: fun animated film
Review: Though not on a level with "Toy Story 2," DreamWorks' animated hit "Chicken Run" provides enough originality of concept and expertise of execution to score as fun, high-spirited entertainment for the whole family. Borrowing heavily from the 1963 classic "The Great Escape," "Chicken Run" cleverly envisions a British poultry farm as a barbed-wired camp in which a group of animated hens and one retired RAF rooster are trapped in a life of hopeless, egg-producing servitude. When the owners of the farm decide to up their profits by converting their operation to a chicken pie manufacturing plant, Ginger, the feisty, levelheaded hen who harbors visions of a glorious life beyond the confines of this hellish prison, decides it is time for the ladies to band together and find a way to escape once and for all. Meanwhile, into their lives drops Rocky the Flying Rooster, a wisecracking American circus performer whose head is easily turned by the attention such a singular stud naturally receives from a coop full of love-starved females. Together, these unlikely heroes and heroines plan and scheme their big break, encountering various setbacks and thwarting multitudinous dangers along the way.

As a piece of animation, "Chicken Run" is truly outstanding. Opting for traditional animated puppetry rather than drawn cel animation or even computer-generated graphics, the creators of "Wallace and Gromit" (Peter Lord and Nick Park) do a remarkable job of creating an assortment of characters whose movements are fluid and whose appearance borders on the surrealistic. In short, these are not "realistic" looking chickens - all the better to enhance the otherworldly quality of the film's setting. The carefully crafted sets and backgrounds represent a similar triumph in the areas of attention to detail and establishment of mood. The movie is, quite simply, a joy to look at from beginning to end, and it is gratifying to know that filmmakers can buck the recent trend towards full scale computer animation and still produce a film that looks this impressive.

Just as important, Karey Kirkpatrick has provided a script filled with clever one-liners, finding just the right balance of acerbic wit and heartwarming sentiment. In addition, every single voice, including Mel Gibson's as Rocky, sounds perfectly right in the context of the character assigned to it.

If there is a bit of a flaw in "Chicken Run," it probably lies in the fact that the story itself is not quite as fresh or original as the technological accoutrements used to put it across. In terms of sophistication, the tale itself sometimes seems to be lagging behind the eye-popping visuals and the ear-tickling dialogue. Still, this is a minor quibble about a film that works so well on so many levels. "Chicken Run" may not be one of the great works of animation, but it certainly stands as one of the best such films of recent times. ***1/2

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: It ain't Wallace and Gromit.
Review: This film epitomizes what happens when geniuses sell out to money-mogul-morons. Wallace and Gromit is to Chicken Run what Citizen Kane is to...what was it...Gallo commercials? Anyway, bye, bye, Nick Parks, you were good in your time. Oh wait, my beloved host won't publish this unless I actually discuss the film. Ok, well, Chicken Run lacked all of the sociological depth found in Wallace and Gromit. Rather than a twisted but profound exploration of modern consciousness, it was a banal and predictable yarn tormented by the voice of that...Mel Gibson. Like Jerry Lewis, they love him in France. But that's Como!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: It's OK
Review: This so-so flim was created by the british clay-animation studio who created a cult sensation (and won three Academy Awards) with their short subjects featuring Wallace and Gromit, present their first feature film, a mixture of comedy and adventure.

Mrs. Tweedy (voice of Miranda Richardson) operates a chicken farm, where most of the birds have resigned themselves to a short and uneventful life of producing eggs and ending up as the main course of someone's Sunday dinner. But when Rocky (voice of Mel Gibson), a rooster from America, arrives on the farm, things begin to change. Rocky soon finds romance with a hen named Ginger (voice of Julia Sawalha) who longs for a better life and has been trying to find a way out of the farm for some time; together they devise a plan to escape to freedom.

However, Rocky and Ginger soon find themselves racing against the clock when Mrs. Tweedy decides it's time to turn the entire flock into chicken pies. Nick Park, director of the Wallace and Gromit shorts, co-directed Chicken Run! Nick Park reached fame (and won Oscars) in America with his claymation comic films about Wallace, a cheese-obsessed Brit twit, and Gromit, his dog-cum-valet, such as The Wrong Trousers, where Wallace and Gromit were tricked by a criminal mastermind (who happened to be a penguin), and A Close Shave, where they became embroiled in an illegal sheep-shearing operation (both available on The Incredible Adventures of Wallace and Gromit).

This time Park turns a plasticine eye toward a Yorkshire chicken farm in the 1950s. It's even darker than the oddly somber hues of the Wallace and Gromit films, and it's not just because this is grim postwar England, waiting for the Beatles to bust things wide open. The farmers, Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy (the voices of Tony Haygarth and Miranda Richardson), are cruel taskmasters who drive their chickens to lay eggs constantly.

However, the Tweedys decide there isn't enough profit in eggs and decide to convert from a poultry farm to a supplier of chicken pies, which of course means certain death for their livestock. A plucky hen named Ginger (Julia Sawalha, a.k.a. Saffy on TV's Absolutely Fabulous), who has been punished for numerous attempted escapes, hasn't given up hope despite her repeated failures.

Then an American chicken named Rocky enters with a new plan to literally fly the coop. As voiced by Mel Gibson, Rocky the Rhode Island Red Rooster, embodies the blithe, bumptious Yank spirit that the Brits both admired and detested during the World Wars. Or as Fowler, a crusty old British rooster puts it, "Pushy Americans, always showing up late for every war."

This film will appeal to some but for most others I advice keeping some reading material nearby while the kids watch it.


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