Chicken Run

Ahhh, Chicken Run. The moment when the world outside England came to recognise the national treasure that is Aardman Animations – who had honed their craft on the brilliant Wallace and Gromit shorts (this being before The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) and the inspired Creature Comforts, netting a batch of short-form Oscars. With Chicken Run, they partnered with Dreamworks and were thus able to reach a much wider audience, and in the process reminded the world that clay animation was still feasible and didn’t have to be as clunky as Pingu or as outright creepy as Mark Twain. Helped along, of course, by the stop-motion success that was The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Sadly, the success of this and the Wallace and Gromit film led to Aardman then going into CG, which started with attempts to recapture their clay style with Flushed Away and then a more halfway measure in Arthur Christmas and The Pirates! before early work on The Croods, which ultimately ended up a very long way from signature Aardman. Since becoming just another CG studio, they have rather lost their charm, their financial opportunities and, well, their way. Sure, their Shaun the Sheep mini-episodes probably keep them well afloat, and every Christmas sees plentiful re-runs of all their films – which is why I’m rewatching Chicken Run for the first time since its 2000 release – and mostly things are very quiet on the Aardman front now, with the latest project being Peter Lord’s Kickstarter for new episodes of Morph that may not even fall under the Aardman banner, and just possibly a big comeback in 2015 with a Shaun the Sheep feature film.

Treading similar ground to Leafie but with a lot less melancholy seriousness and a lot more silly fun and escape-movie themes, Chicken Run is about battery hens who know that when they stop laying, they face the chopping block, so plot to escape. The possibility of getting away suddenly becomes real when into the coop flies a brash American rooster named Rocky – in a stroke of genius casting played by Mel Gibson – who has been promoted by a travelling circus as able to fly. His wing is injured, but a plot is hatched – so to speak – to get him to teach the rest of the chickens to fly so that they can get out. Unfortunately, the time of his arrival also coincides with the sinister farm owner Mrs Tweedy deciding that it’s time for her chickens to stop being egg-layers, and start being slaughtered en mass.

The thing Aardman used to get so right was their humour. What is brilliant about the writing of Chicken Run is that every single sympathetic character can be taken seriously or can be very funny. Main characters Ginger and Rocky are mostly the serious, smart ones on the cast, but their prickly relationship provides some great laughs, and behind Rocky’s façade he’s a guy that will fall into every pie. Wise-cracking rats played by Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels echoing the TV roles that made them famous are in the traditional annoying-comic-relief role, yet are just the right mixture of wise-cracking and ending up the butt of the joke that they are actually appealing. The chickens themselves are a great bunch, with broad stereotypes aplenty yet – again – the chance for the writers to make each of them serious. Jane Horrocks and Imelda Staunton obviously have a great time as two very silly chickens, and Mr Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, Benjamin Whitrow, is the moody old military rooster who when he shows his soft side gets one of the finest scenes in the film. And then there’s Miranda Richardson being deliciously evil as Mrs Tweedy, with another comic foil in the form of Mr Tweedy, very hard to write as non-annoying but who works thanks to the good joke of him constantly seeing the most outlandish things without anybody believing him.

So for all this praise, why have I not wanted to rewatch Chicken Run in over a decade, or consider it alongside The Wrong Trousers as amongst the best of Aardman? Well, the thing is…I think it’s just the chickens. They’re well-written, they’re likeable, they’re funny…but they’re still rather funny-looking plump chickens with teeth and silly googly eyes…and while I’m amused by them, that’s not the extent of the connection I make with most beloved animated characters – including, yes, Wallace and Gromit.

But on the rewatch, I think I’ve probably been mistaken. This is a film that does everything it can right, given the concept, and it’s such a very Aardman concept that I really don’t feel I can complain about that. Ultimately, the only real shame about Chicken Run is that the place it put Aardman doesn’t feel like where they belong. 

Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out / A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit

I remember that my thoughts on A Grand Day Out were pretty negative when I first saw it. This was when The Wrong Trousers was all the rage, and this 1989 short was shown retrospectively. With Creature Comforts by then widely-known and being used for the Heat Electric adverts and Nick Park becoming ever more famous, The Wrong Trousers and then A Close Shave were big successes for Aardman. The likes of Chicken Run and the currently-running The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists owe their greenlighting to the popularity of 90s Aardman, and they built upon the success of this.

And it was a success. It was Oscar-nominated, and the short that it lost out to was actually Creature Comforts. It has that distinctive Wallace and Gromit charm and silliness with a feel-good factor, and some pretty ambitious shots for low-budget clay animation. So why was I less than enthused? Well, really because the two sequels set my expectations too high.

That’s the problem, really, with going back to the first film when you’ve seen the excellent sequels made with more funding and buoyed by the confidence success brings. This first effort just doesn’t look as good, nor does it tell as interesting and amusing a story. The models are notably less visually pleasing than their more developed versions from the other films – Wallace’s head is rather an unappealing shape, and Gromit looks…a bit dirty. The cooker is a funny little idea and brings along a good way to have a satisfying ending, but beside the antagonists of other Wallace and Gromit shorts rather pales in comparison. And I just didn’t feel like the moon actually being made of cheese fit into the later Wallace and Gromit world.

Rewatching it on this fine grey Easter Sunday, though, I found it much more charming than my cynical younger self had led me to remember. By the time I was watching, Wallace and Gromit were known to all, and I never appreciated the stroke of genius that is introducing your principle characters having them sat in a little living room wondering where to go on holiday and talking about having some cheese on crackers. That Yorkshire accent is instantly both likeable and a bit daft, and it’s interesting that one of the first things that happens is that Gromit makes some noise. The story, despite the enormous distance it covers, is charmingly small-scale and simple.

Undeniably both the technical side and the writing would improve very rapidly for The Wrong Trousers, but there’s still much to be said for A Grand Day Out, and it led to some excellent things. The world would certainly be a poorer place without Aardman’s work, and I hope that they will at some point soon make their feature film masterpiece.

And this film always makes me want to listen to Penguins on the Moon and hope one day it gets set to animation. 

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists / The Pirates! Band of Misfits

While Aardman’s latest feature film is a definite hit and a good, solid film, it falls a little short of brilliance by lacking a little vital spark of warmth and heart. Really, though, these are problems not with Aardman but with the source material.

A lively but inept pirate crew love their captain. However, he’s destined for embarrassment when he sets his sights on the Pirate of the Year award, which is based on how much booty each captain brings in. However, a chance encounter with a young Charles Darwin reveals that not is all as it seems with the ship’s parrot, and a harebrained scheme to get rich on a scientific prize is formed. However, lurking in the shadows is the dastardly Queen Victoria – who loathes pirates.

Pirates are of course a firm favourite with kids and show up everywhere in animation, from old adaptations of Treasure Island to One Piece. Pirates of the Caribbean is one of the biggest movie successes of our times and there are ever more stories about space pirates, steampunk pirates and fantasy pirates. The themes are nice and broad, there will always be motivations for every character and yet the violence is always on the cartoonish side. You’re on safe ground with pirates.

And Aardman are nothing if not masters of the little touches. This film is a rapidfire succession of brilliant visual gags and jokes – in three successive shots, there’s a joke about the coin slots on pool tables (to get cannonballs out), a joke about bowling alleys (as the cannonballs appear) and a joke about when dogs put their heads out of car windows. There is lots of very British silliness (how many outside these fair lands recognise that Blue Peter badge?) and the dialogue and characterisation has the air of a pantomime. The plot is simple but funny, with Polly just skirting being called a MacGuffin, and the voice acting is superb – Hugh Grant and David Tennant play off one another expertly and without ever drawing attention to themselves as actors, so that it’s easy to forget they are not simply the clay characters on the screen. Cameos from Lenny Henry, Salma Hayek and especially Brian Blessed are a hoot, and the main crew have an excellent dynamic. Imelda Staunton’s voice couples with a simply brilliant model to make a perfect villain who can look both threatening and hilarious depending on the situation.

The main issues I have are very small, but build up to keep the pirates all at arm’s length. One is the book’s notion that the crew should all lack names. So we get The Pirate Captain, the Pirate with Gout, the Albino Pirate and the Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (who is of course in the Mary Read vein). It all gets a bit laboured and strained and reminds the audience constantly that these are cardboard figures, and awesome scenes about ham can only go so far to redress that. Then there is the way so much of the humour revolves around hurting random stranger by dropping anchors on them and suchlike. Plus making a plot point of ‘Mallet space’ (here, in a luxuriant beard), again preventing the audience forgetting they are watching animation. Finally, I just don’t think the monkey talking through cards in his hand works. It never raises more than a vague smile and isn’t worth the cost in believability. Obviously, these are all individually minor matters and I don’t think that what Pirates! really needed was to be terribly realistic – but the little niggles as I said prevented me from ever really relating to any of the crew, and thus about really caring about any of them. Even the most emotionally accessible member of the crew was known only as ‘Number 2’ or ‘The Pirate with a Scarf’.

This is not to say this isn’t an excellent animated film. It is. I just know Aardman can do much better, and want to see them make something that will touch people, not just tickle at their funny bones. 

Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Aardman are now established on the international animation circuit, where once they were a very British phenomenon. With Chicken Run, their appealing, wide-mouthed claymation style was introduced to a wider audience, most notably in America, while this film cemented their reputation, so that today the upcoming release of Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists is quite an event, and their 3D branch, while less of a stand-out, is a moderate success too, with Arthur Christmas and Flushed Away at least on the radar of most parents and animation fans. Every 3DS owner in the UK, and for all I know far beyond, is getting new 3D cartoons of Shaun the Sheep, Wallace and Gromit have been parodied on The Simpsons and Hayao Miyazaki has professed himself a fan and had an Aardman exhibit set up for a time in the Ghibli museum.

It was really this film that was the pivot: it had much to prove at the time. The quite brilliant The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave were still very much obscurities outside England, and Chicken Run had just made the world sit up and take notice. On the other hand, I’d hold this film up as an example of a studio in the right place being able to have a misfire but still garner much praise, as though they could do no wrong; much as I love Aardman and especially Wallace and Gromit, which has buckets more charm than Chicken Run or Arthur Christmas, I was disappointed when I saw this, back on Hallowe’en 2005.

After mentioning affectionately that my dear ole mum mixed up the name and called it ‘Grommarsh and Wurzel’, I wrote that the film ‘follows Wallace and his loyal, bizarrely sexualised canine life partner as they attempt to protect the town’s vegetables from a terrible furry menace. It was fun, but not quite as good as I’d hoped – not as witty or as affecting as Chicken Run, The Wrong Trousers or A Close Shave, and rather harder to swallow than any of them. Still, it made me smile throughout, and [was full of] funny references.’ I would probably have left out that part about Gromit being sexualised if I wrote today, despite the van scenes, as it’s an observation that lends itself to endless academic overanalysis and conjecture, as well as painting the duo in what may seem like a disparaging light when actually I adore them. The film has a great cast – Ralph Fiennes hamming it up, posh Helena Bonham Carter being extra-posh as ‘Totty’, and of course Peter Sallis providing Wallace’s wonderful Yorkshire accent. Like many light comedy animations, much of its humour comes from pastiche, with the title making it clear that the subject here would be horror, undermined by the fearsome creature being a bunny. A plethora of terrible rabbit-related puns ensue, the worst being ‘24-carrot bullets’, as well as the staples of the series: impressive action scenes with Gromit – one of the great mute characters of animation – having to work very hard, silly Rube Goldberg machines and a sweet obsession with silly things like cheese and vegetable competitions. It’s all delightfully English, daft and charming and pandering only very slightly to a wider audience. (Supposedly accents had to be toned down a little.)

My problem was not that it was bad – only that I had hoped it would be much better. It simply isn’t up there with the sheer brilliance of The Wrong Trousers, which remains the best outing for the characters. I wanted the concept to be on a grander scale (while of course retaining the tweeness), and there to be less viciousness about dispatching the baddie. Essentially, I think Wallace and Gromit would be much more widely-known had the film been a longer version of The Wrong Trousers. That said, I hope Nick Park gets another shot at a Wallace and Gromit feature. Indeed, many more shots – the more the better!

For all I may have felt it was underwhelming, though, it was critically lauded, and of course was an Oscar winner. I’ll leave you with what I wrote on 06.03.06, the morningafter the ceremony: ‘Fond as I am of Wallace and Gromit, I don’t think Were-Rabbit should have won against Howl’s Moving Castle. Neither of them were my favourite films from their respective makers, but Howl was certainly the better film. Then again, Spirited Away won last time, and the Academy always seems averse to rewarding the same people consecutively.'

Arthur Christmas

With Chicken Run, Aardman unexpectedly brought their claymation style to a much wider audience. They had been charming British audiences for years, of course, from the Creature Comforts shorts to their celebrated Wallace and Gromit films. Despite my initial fears, this film also does not signal the end of their relationship with the medium – the claymation The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists comes out within a few weeks. So what is Arthur Christmas? An experiment? A side-project? A Sony animation with the Aardman name added to give it a sense of familiar, homespun eccentricity?

Ultimately, it looks like Aardman writing and humour packaged up by Sony’s slick CG animation put through the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs character design filter. A union that works well, impressive but remaining silly-looking and with some good humour – though perhaps some more cuteness in the design side would have helped.

The story is a slightly cheeky take on Christmas traditions. Santa isn’t a being who lives forever – ‘Santa’ is more a title, handed down from father to son. The current Santa is getting on a bit, though his eccentric and ancient father is still alive. His successor is likely to be his eldest son Steve, who has come up with an incredibly efficient system to deliver presents to every child on Earth, involving a vastly supersonic spaceship with an underbelly that mimics the night sky, numerous video streams and specialists for every situation. Steve’s younger brother Arthur is clumsy and useless, but works hard in the letters department, writing back to children to instil them with a sense of wonder. However, when one child is missed and the current and incumbent Santas will not deal with it, it falls to Arthur, his mad old grandfather and the elf from the wrapping department who discovered the missed present to solve the problem – the old-fashioned way.

It’s unwise to attribute too much of an agenda to the film. It’s less about putting technology and heart in opposition than in contrasting ruthless corporate efficiency with caring about the individuals – without suggesting for a moment that life could go on without those who run complex operations with precision and tight controls. The ending may give priority to those who care about the children rather than the well-oiled machine, but the machine still has to be there.

Arthur Christmas won’t be for everyone – it is twee and full of cartoony designs but never quite gets to loveable, which it possibly could have done by making Arthur younger and less comical. It is not highly original, nor ever all that emotional. And it suffers from having its goal achievable in half an hour, then having to be stalled by things like misreading of maps and having to make the right first impression, which all gets a bit artificial – though missiles flying gave the climax oomph.

Aardman give the film the slight edge it needs to stand out – a very British setting and British humour. The most obvious place this happens is in the Christmas meal. While everyone knows the jokes about families getting together at Christmas only to squabble and fight, it’s actually very rare to see this in a Christmas film, and having it in one about Santa's family strikes me as amusingly subversive. There are also a lot of great little visual gags, like the poor seal that happens to be where the spacecraft is rising up out of the icy water, or a model elf appearing where you expect poor Bryony to end up. There are some nice little moments with random elf extras in mission control, and the grandpa character gets great lines.

It also helps that the cast is great. Jim Broadbent is peerless in the ‘wet and hapless but instantly likeable old man’ role, and Hugh Laurie steals the show in a return to characterisation many miles from House that ought to amuse and bemuse American audiences unfamiliar with his comedy work. Bill Nighy has a lot of fun, and James McAvoy pitches Arthur nicely between sensitive and daft. Michael Palin has a superb little cameo as a daft old communications elf, with some of the funniest moments in the film, and Ashley Jensen pitches Bryony just right (as long as Americans can understand the accent). Everything was just right – though perhaps Justin Bieber’s ending song could have been something more…timeless.

This feels neither like the start of a great renaissance for Sony Pictures Animation nor like a reinvention of Aardman, but if they collaborate a few more times, I feel like they might just make a real classic.