Film

Chicken Run

Name: Chicken Run
Genre: Animation, Comedy, Family
Released: 2000
Cast: Julia Sawalha, Mel Gibson, Imelda Staunton, Jane Horrocks, Lynn Ferguson

Aardman's stop-motion take on the classic POW escape movie, restaged in a Yorkshire henhouse: a flock of chickens facing the pie machine plot their breakout with help from a swaggering circus rooster who can't actually fly. It's slapstick, contraptions and Cold War prison-movie tropes squeezed into clay, funny for kids and adults alike, with real tension humming under the jokes.

TMDb rating

6.9

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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Hand-drawn British animation about a warren of rabbits fleeing destruction and a tyrannical rival colony - the same threatened-home, desperate-flight bones as Chicken Run, stripped of every joke.

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Isle of Dogs2018

Stop-motion animals banished from home and plotting their way back, with the same handmade texture and animal-society world-building Chicken Run does so well.

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Early Man2018no page yet

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Flushed Away2006no page yet

Aardman's cheeky sensibility transplanted into CGI, with sewer rats standing in for chickens and the same fondness for elaborate contraptions and daring escape plots.

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Escape from Alcatraz1979

Chicken Run borrows its entire plot architecture - the escape committee, the smuggled tools, the watchtower, the tunnel - straight from prison-break cinema; this is that genre played dead straight.

Clint Eastwood plans a meticulous, based-on-fact prison break in this quiet thriller, tunnelling and scheming with the same patient ingenuity as the coop's own escape committee.

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Both films hide the same moral engine under kids'-film packaging - animals raised and marked for slaughter, industry as the true villain - but Okja refuses to look away from what that actually means.

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