It would be nice -- it would be bliss -- if this, at eighty-odd minutes, were three times as good as any of the half-hour Wallace and Gromit shorts issued from the same British claymation studio, Aardman. Things don't work like that. An hour and a half is not a specification of internal necessity; it is a dictate of the market. And a muralist is not by nature an artist more serious and ambitious than a miniaturist. The premise of the film -- the repeated escape attempts of a gaggle of hens from their barbwired enclosure in the dwindling days before the conversion of Tweedy's Egg Farm into a chicken-pie factory -- is ripe enough, reminiscent of Tight Little Island in its parody of Finest Hour heroism. (The stringy old cock called Fowler, garrulous veteran of the RAF, makes the connection clear.) And the sensibility of British understatement has not been stood on its head, and there are a fair share of gags for grownups, as well as one harrowing sequence in which two birds survive a test run through the hellish innards of the automated pie-maker. But stretching the premise to feature length entails a certain overextension, a playing of it for more than it's worth, a degree of corner-cutting, a thinning or scattering of detail, and an indecent exposure of the stock characters in all their unadorned stockness. The stop-motion animation, as compared with the Wallace and Gromit paragons, appears smoother, more seamless, more machine-tooled in its forms and its movements, so that the hens look to have terra-cotta hardbodies and rubber-ducky rictus. For all you can tell, it could indeed almost be computer animation, programmed to simulate claymation. Some of the charm, in any event, has been lost. Some retained. Nick Park, the Wallace and Gromit creator, shares the directing credit with Peter Lord, but it would be unfair to lay the difference at the feet of Lord. The difference is quite precisely an hour. With the voices of Mel Gibson, Julia Sawalha, Miranda Richardson, Jane Horrocks. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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