Nick Park

Gromit makes his feelings clear with his eyes and eyebrows, without saying a word. Nick Park gives that small performance time to register, even among the contraptions and slapstick. We know where to look because the face is doing something worth watching. His preference for clay that still looks handled suits these characters, whose movements and reactions have to do so much of the work.

A Grand Day Out (1990) introduced Wallace and Gromit, and The Wrong Trousers (1993) developed their partnership through inventive plotting. Park moved into features with Chicken Run (2000), co-directed with Peter Lord, bringing that attention to small differences in behaviour to a whole flock. Wallace and Gromit then got their own feature in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). The important change for his comedy was the longer running time, which asks more of a premise as well as its characters.

In Chicken Run, Karey Kirkpatrick's screenplay turns a Yorkshire chicken coop into a prisoner-of-war camp. Lord and Park make the birds' attempts to leave the farm matter without requiring us to recognise the films being borrowed from. Ginger's determination keeps the situation clear, and much of the humour comes from the chickens treating escape as serious work. We cared about them because the directors gave their wish to get out the same attention an escape film would give its human prisoners. The expressive animation lets each inmate have a personality beyond a place in the next joke.

The prison-camp routine does occasionally stretch thin, and even at 84 minutes Chicken Run has passages that could move faster. Its expressive inmates do enough to keep those stretches enjoyable, though a firmer edit would have helped the jokes. For a first encounter, choose Chicken Run; no knowledge of prison-camp films is required.