Peter Lord

The chickens in Chicken Run (2000) have an urgent ambition: to leave their Yorkshire coop. Peter Lord and co-director Nick Park give that ambition the seriousness an escape film demands, and much of the humour comes from the birds' earnest approach to getting out. We cared whether Ginger escaped because the directors made her determination matter beyond the next joke. That willingness to take an unlikely character seriously is a good reason to seek out Lord's work.

That concern with individual behaviour runs through Lord's shorter work. He co-founded Aardman with David Sproxton in 1972, and their shorts and television work included Morph. The Conversation Pieces series (1983) combined animation with documentary-style audio recordings, while his short Wat's Pig (1996) used a split screen. Chicken Run was Aardman's first feature: the change in scale meant sustaining our interest in a coop full of characters across a feature-length escape story.

Karey Kirkpatrick's screenplay for Chicken Run borrows the structure of a prisoner-of-war escape film, with a clear debt to The Great Escape. Lord shares the direction with Park and also has a story credit; we would be wary of assigning every good decision to either director alone. Together, they allow the birds their own concerns instead of making every exchange point towards another film. The expressive stop-motion animation helps: each inmate has enough personality to hold our attention when the writing grows comfortable.

The reservation is that the prison-camp routine occasionally asks for more patience than it earns. At 84 minutes, Chicken Run still has stretches that could move faster, and the animation cannot freshen every borrowed convention. We like Lord's work most when the chickens' determination supplies the comedy, rather than the recognition of an old escape-film device. Start with this film for the birds; knowing the war films it borrows from is optional.