HOLLYWOOD, June 16, 2000 — Nick Park and Peter Lord learned a thing or two about chickens.
The creators and directors of “Chicken Run,” DreamWorks’ claymation feature opening in theaters June 21, found themselves pecking around a coop to study the movement and lives of the animals they’d soon build into action heroes.
“We got right in amongst them, the proper Method acting thing,” recalls Lord. “Studied their life cycle, found out just about everything we needed to know, then forgot it completely because it was irrelevant.”
That’s because “Chicken Run” is essentially, as Park calls it, “a story about people in chicken costumes, really.” The animals are given teeth, hats and scarves, making them — other than that laying-egg thing — entirely human.
The film takes place at Tweedy’s Egg Farm, where a determined cluck named Ginger (voiced by “Absolutely Fabulous'” Julia Sawalha repeatedly tries — unsuccessfully — to break the flock out.
The future looks gloomy until a circus rooster named Rocky (voiced by Mel Gibson) accidentally lands in their coop. Thinking he’s the answer to their prayers, Ginger asks Rocky to train the chickens how to “fly,” prompting a flood of shenanigans and hilarious hijinks. But they must race against time: The farm owner, Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) plans to throw them into a machine that manufactures chicken pot pies.
But making such a film was daunting for its directors, who rode to fame on their Wallace & Gromit clay-animated shorts and have three Oscars and three nominations between them. Lord cut his teeth on commercials and Peter Gabriel’s famous “Sledgehammer” music video, while Park made short films such as “The Wrong Trousers” and “A Close Shave.”
For this, their first feature collaboration, the British animators went to DreamWorks and pitched their idea as “an escape movie with chickens.”
“We could never have anticipated just how much more work it was gonna be,” Park says. “We often said to ourselves, this feels like 20 or 30 times the amount, I think, because of the amount of characters. Every single shot seems to have about 20 chickens in the background who are dancing, running or whatever. Even just blinking was an enormous amount of work.”
He adds, “We realized we’d chosen one of the worst creatures you could possibly animate in that they are balanced on two thin legs, and for this kind of animation it’s a practical problem because they easily fall over.”
It worked for the comic aspect of the story, which pays homage to a countless number of adventure films, from “The Great Escape” to “Stalag 17” to the Indiana Jones and “Star Wars” films.
“Above all, they’re funny,” Lord admits. “The story’s so perfect in what you know about chickens is they’re cowards. … They’re pretty damn stupid, so it was so terrific to put them in a heroic role and especially in the opening sequences — behaving like action heroes but looking like these absurd middle-aged English women and chickens … it’s a lovely combination.”
The standout, of course, is Gibson’s brash American rooster, who charms the ladies but turns out to be as chicken as the rest of them.
Bringing Gibson in to voice Rocky was quite a task: “We literally pulled him off ‘The Patriot’ to be a chicken for an afternoon,” Park says, but Gibson, a longtime Wallace & Gromit fan, was willing to step in and even poke fun at himself. (Rocky enters yelling “FREEDOM!” Gibson’s famous diatribe from “Braveheart.”)
“We were scared to approach him, being such a big star,” Park says. “And what if he says no? It’ll be so embarrassing. But really it was about having a laugh. He knew our sense of humor, and he just played around and was a good sport.”
And in case you were wondering, while “Chicken Run’s” poultry threats might give vegans a solid case, it didn’t deter the crew to boycott Colonel Sanders.
Says Park, “It gave the crew an appetite, actually.”