Nick Park is one of the greatest filmmakers in motion-picture history — and chances are that, until this week, you’d never heard of him or his movies. Park has made five films. Four of them are short subjects — the longest of which runs thirty minutes, the briefest a mere five. Three of those shorts are comic masterpieces, comparable to the silent classics of Chaplin and Keaton. The other two Park works are merely wonderful, including his first full-length Hollywood feature, Chicken Run, which just opened in three thousand theaters nationwide.
Park’s movies are filmed on tiny sets populated by characters made of clay. They are photographed frame by frame (it takes twenty-four frames to make one second of film) to give the illusion of movement and action. This is an almost unimaginably painstaking process. Park and his colleagues must make hundreds of adjustments to the clay figures and the sets and the lighting for each frame they shoot. Chicken Run has 118,000 individual shots in it. These are dense images, in which as many as twenty clay characters might be moving about in the foreground and background. Chicken Run took three years to make and is, by leagues, the most elaborate picture of its kind ever made.
The process of animating miniature figures through what is called “stop-motion” is almost as old as film itself. In George Melies’s 1902 A Voyage to the Moon — one of the first commercial movies — a spaceship crashes into the unhappy clay eye of the Man in the Moon. Ninety years after Melies’s groundbreaking work, Park took us on another clay voyage to the moon in A Grand Day Out, which he made entirely by himself. It took him six years to complete the twenty-three-minute film. It was worth every moment.
A Grand Day Out introduces Park’s creations — a fussy middle-aged bachelor Englishman named Wallace and his trusty terrier, Gromit — who build a spaceship and fly to the moon on a bank holiday so Wallace can have a nice afternoon feasting on the lunar surface. Wallace, it is fair to say, is obsessed with cheese. But he’s puzzled by the taste of the moon. “Stilton?” he suggests. Gromit takes a sniff and shakes his head.
Gromit is far more clever than Wallace. He doesn’t speak, or bark, but he does knit and cook and read The Republic by Pluto (not Plato; Pluto, as in the Disney character). He also enjoys the Morning Post, and when we watch him at the breakfast table perusing a story, the headline says: “Dog Reads Paper.”
They soon discover that Melies was wrong: There’s no man in the moon. But there is an object sitting somewhere near the Sea of Tranquility that looks like a stove from the 1940s. It comes to life when Wallace, thinking it’s a candy dispenser, deposits a ten-pence coin in a slot on the side. The machine is annoyed by the presence of the Earthlings — it goes around gluing pieces of cheese back after Wallace has taken a slice — until it picks up a travel magazine Wallace has brought with him. It sees a photograph of a skier and has a fantasy about shussing down the Alps. The machine is determined to climb on board the spaceship and ride it back to earth so that it can take a vacation of its own.
With A Grand Day Out, Park established a signature style. His movies are comedies of manners in which his clueless countrymen and women are outwitted, threatened, and saved by the animals in their care.
They’re full of peculiar and ingenious contraptions that inevitably go haywire. But what really separates his movies from others using the same technique is the eye for detail in the sets, lighting, and music. Wallace lives in a somewhat shabby townhouse in a typical provincial English city, full of 1950s furniture and brightened up with cheery wallpaper and pictures: Gromit’s room is covered in a blue pattern with doggie bones, while Wallace has a painting of a wedge of Swiss cheese over his bed.
Park made two more Wallace and Gromit films, A Close Shave and The Wrong Trousers, both of which won Oscars (A Grand Day Out lost the Oscar for Best Animated Short Subject to another hilarious Park film, Creature Comforts, in which zoo animals issue complaints about how boring their lives are — actual words from real interviews with visitors to an English zoo). The Wrong Trousers involves a pair of mechanical pants, an impassively sinister penguin with a jewel-heist scheme, and a climax in which the penguin and Gromit race through Wallace’s living room on two toy-train tracks. In A Close Shave, Gromit is framed for kidnapping sheep by a vicious bull mastiff who makes off with a contraption designed by Wallace called the Knit-O-Matic.
The new full-length feature Chicken Run is not equal to Park’s earlier work. He co-directed it with Peter Lord, who was one of the producers on the Wallace and Gromit movies, and for the first time he is not credited with the screenplay (which is by Karey Kirk-patrick). It shows.
Chicken Run is quite wordy, while its predecessors are mostly silent except for Wallace’s occasional expressions of joy at the glories of food (“Cracking toast, Gromit!” Wallace says with great appreciation at breakfast). It lacks Park’s usual helium-light touch, and in its more obvious and sentimental moments shows the tetchy influence of DreamWorks co-chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, who supervised Disney’s animated renaissance from The Little Mermaid through Aladdin but lost his way with DreamWorks’ first cartoon feature, the deadly Prince of Egypt.
Still, Chicken Run is mostly adorable, with several amazing sequences. The setting is a poultry camp in the north of England, and before the opening title we watch as an intrepid chicken named Ginger burrows her way under a fence, digs a tunnel, and tries various other methods to break out of Tweedy’s Farm. The chickens that fail to lay their quota of eggs are removed to the slaughterhouse and eaten for dinner by the henpecked owner, Mr. Tweedy, and his harridan of a wife.
Ginger is always caught by Mr. Tweedy, who punishes his wayward chicken by hurling her into a dumpster. There, she amuses herself by bouncing a ball back and forth (a la Steve McQueen in The Great Escape). When the bitter Mrs. Tweedy installs a gigantic new machine for making chicken pot pie — “Chickens go in,” she says with miserly glee, “pies come out” — Ginger realizes that escape is truly a matter of life and death. The scene in which she takes a wild journey through the innards of the machine, gumming up the works along the way, both evokes and equals Charlie Chaplin’s indelible voyage through an industrial combine in Modern Times.
Ginger enlists the help of a traveling rooster, a Rhode Island Red named Rocky (the voice is Mel Gibson’s), who she mistakenly believes can fly. Rocky is thrilled by the adulation of the females and begins a ridiculous exercise program to teach them the principles of flight. When Ginger realizes that Rocky is a sham, she turns to a Scottish hen touched with daffy engineering genius to design a flying machine that looks like a giant chicken to get the prisoners over the fence and into safety.
Perhaps the problem with Chicken Run is that Park is simply too good for the job. He has advanced the stop-motion form so far that it seems almost as if the events you’re watching might be taking place: The film becomes a latter-day version of The Great Escape — and The Great Escape is simply a better and more affecting film. Park’s next effort is going to be a full-length Wallace and Gromit adventure. Now, that’s something worth waiting for, whether the wait is three years, six years, or a hundred.
A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.
