Trailer
Plot summary
Ginger leads the chickens on a Yorkshire egg farm run by Mrs Tweedy and her submissive husband, who kill and eat any hen that stops laying eggs. Escape attempts keep failing. Mr Tweedy suspects the birds are organized, but his wife dismisses the idea. One night Ginger watches an American rooster, Rocky Rhodes, glide over the fences and crash-land. The chickens splint his sprained wing and hide him, since his owner has promised a reward for his return. Ginger begs him to teach the flock to fly, saying she will hand him over if he refuses, and Rocky reluctantly gives lessons. Then equipment arrives at the farm: Mrs Tweedy has ordered a chicken pie machine to turn it into a pie-making factory.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Chicken Run (2000)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- DreamWorks beat Disney, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. to Aardman largely through the perseverance of co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, who explained that he had “been chasing these guys for five or six years, ever since I first saw Creature Comforts”. Chicken Run became DreamWorks' first animated feature.
- To make the stop-motion chickens appear to speak, the animators fitted each character with a different physical beak for every individual sound, changing the beak out to match each part of the dialogue.
- Chicken Run's stop-motion shoot used 30 separate sets and around 80 animators, out of 180 people working overall, yet the painstaking process yielded only one minute of finished film for every week of shooting.
- Made on a budget of only $42-45 million, Chicken Run became a huge box-office hit, and it remains the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film ever made.
