Peter Lord and Nick Park have been working together for fifteen
years now, ever since Park, a film student finishing his first
animated film starring what have become his most famous
characters Wallace and Gromit, joined the Aardman Animations
studio in Bristol. Lord was already there; he’d co-founded
the enterprise in 1972 with David Sproxton. Both have since
earned enthusiastic recognition for their work: Lord was twice
nominated (in 1992 and 1996) for the Academy Award for Best
Animated Short, and Park has won the Oscar three times (in
1990, 1993 and 1995).

Now the two men have collaborated as directors (with Sproxton
serving as their co-producer) on Aardman’s first feature film,
“Chicken Run,” made in association with DreamWorks Pictures
and Pathe. From the first inklings of the story idea to the
finished product, the picture took some four-and-a-half years
to make; the time-consuming model animation technique in
which Aardman specializes (a sophisticated sort of claymation),
along with the complexity of many of the scenes, in which
numerous figures were involved simultaneously in elaborate
sets, meant that only an average of ten seconds a day could
be accomplished in the new studio built for the project. (The
actual amount varied from about twenty seconds a week at the
beginning, when twelve units were operating, to perhaps ninety
a week toward the end, when the number of units had grown to
thirty.)

Lord and Park visited Dallas recently to talk about their
picture, which will hatch, so to speak, in theatres beginning
on June 21. The duo seemed an oddly complementary pair, with
Park lean and soft-spoken and Lord burlier and more ebullient.
But they had a shared enthusiasm for their craft, often
building upon what the other said about their pet project,
the tale of some poultry, scrambling to survive in the prison
camp-like atmosphere of a Yorkshire egg farm in the 1950s, who
undertake to escape to freedom. The leader of the effort is
idealistic, voluble Ginger (Julia Sawalha, of “Absolutely
Fabulous”), whose failed attempts always wind her in the
solitary confinement of a coal bin; but her dreams are
energized by the arrival of Rocky (Mel Gibson), an American
rooster who claims the ability to fly. Ginger blackmails him
into teaching her and her companions the skill so that they
can simply fly the coop; the scheme is complicated, however,
by the fact that Rocky isn’t all he claims, and a plan by
the villainous owners of the farm (Miranda Richardson as the
cold-as-ice Mrs. Tweedy and Tony Haygarth as her bumbling
husband) to change from egg production to the baking of
chicken-pot pies. Will the poultry become pastry? Or will
these unlikely heroes make a successful break?

“We’d been searching around for ideas [for a feature] for a
long time,” Park explained about the genesis of “Chicken Run.”
“And there was this sketch in my sketchbook of a chicken
digging out of a coop.” The drawing brought to mind the old
Steve McQueen picture “The Great Escape,” which both men loved.
“We were brought up on that movie,” Park continued. “It was
on every holiday, along with ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and ‘The Sound
of Music.’ Every boy watched ‘The Great Escape.’ It was a
marriage of two ideas that came together at just the right
point. It hit us, at the same time, really–we could do an
escape movie with chickens.”

“It wouldn’t have done with any other animals,” Lord added.
“Not least because chicken huts looked just like the barracks
in ‘Stalag 17’ or ‘The Great Escape.’ It was that image, the
perfection of that match, that seemed so amusing. And knowing
that chickens were so unheroic, proverbially unheroic animals,
it was really funny to take them and make them our stars.”

“We didn’t want to remake ‘The Great Escape’ for a moment,”
Lord quickly added. “What we wanted to do was to capture some
of the spirit of that film, some of the way it made us feel
when we were kids.”

Moreover, Park jumped in, “It [‘The Great Escape’] was one
of those movies that hasn’t come round again yet. No one’s
remade it. It a genre that hasn’t already been cribbed.”

But getting the idea for the plot was only the beginning of
a long process for Lord and Park, which included working with
writer Karey Kirkpatrick to turn the notion into a finished
script, assembling designers and animators to stage the action
painstakingly in their new studio, choosing the voice talent
who could bring the many characters to life, and making sure
that the completed picture had a style and tone all its own.
The pair aimed at the feel of one of the brilliant Ealing
live-action comedies of the 1950s which are still recognized
as classics. “We grew up on the Ealing comedies,” Lord said.
“There’s something about the atmosphere in them that’s unique.
But I don’t really know what it is, except there’s something
about those quite benign eccentrics–very English eccentrics–
that was fun to play with.” The result is an animated movie
with a flock of rich, colorful animal figures, including not
only hens and roosters, all of them with quite individual
quirks, but a couple of shifty rats as well. And the careful
attention to the sets, backgrounds and lighting gives the movie
a distinctive visual appearance, too. “That’s part of what
we love about this [model animation] technique,” Park remarked.
“It’s three-dimensional, and you can light it and do your
camerawork just like a live-action movie, but in miniature.”

The directors interviewed a great many British performers for
the leading roles before settling on their eventual choices.
But they had always had Gibson in mind for Rocky. “We actually
designed Rocky, before we cast him, as Mel Gibson,” Park
noted. “One thing that inspired us is that we were watching
‘Maverick,’ and that’s kind of what gave us the idea of using
him. It was very similar in that he was a lovable rogue.” In
fact, after designing Rocky the pair extracted a line from
“Maverick” and animated it to see if Gibson’s voice matched
the puppet they’d designed. “And it worked really well,” Park
said. “That’s what decided it for us.”

Now, after nearly half a decade’s work, Lord and Park can revel
in what’s a culmination of sorts of the fascination in model
animation they’ve both had since their youth. Park commented,
somewhat wistfully: “I think my earliest memory, actually,
is sitting out in the garden in a hole that we’d dug making
clay worms with my friend.” And Lord noted that the
special-effects master Ray Harryhausen probably influenced
him more than any other person. “I can remember thinking,
when I was about twelve and saw ‘Jason and the Argonauts,’
‘Wow, that’s what filmmaking is all about.” Now together
they’ve shaped Aardman into a major force in model animation,
and with “Chicken Run,” moved it from shorts, videos and
commercial work firmly into the feature marketplace.

And fans will rehoice to know that it’s only the beginning.
In October, 1999, Aardman signed an agreement with DreamWorks
to make four additional features in their new studio. The
next is a projected version of “The Tortoise and the Hare,”
and the third might just star Wallace and Gromit. And the
one after that? Well, at four-and-a-half years a pop, that’s
quite a ways down the road.

Grade: D+

When even producer Jerry Bruckheimer, King of the Trite and
Brainless Action Film (“The Rock,” “Con Air,” “Armageddon”)
admits that in remaking Toby Halicki’s 1974 cult favorite
everyone realized that some complexity needed to be added, you
know that the earlier flick must have been incredibly vacuous.
And of course you’d be right: the original (Halicki was killed
while preparing a stunt for a sequel in 1989) is remembered for
virtually nothing except the fact that it boasted a car chase
that went on for a full forty minutes. But this retooled model,
despite the best efforts of scripter Scott Rosenberg (who was
also involved with “Con Air” and “Armageddon”), remains a
wafer-thin contrivance, with nothing more on its mind that
providing an adrenaline rush to the intellectually undemanding;
and the strictly workmanlike direction of Dominic Sena doesn’t
give it any heart or distinction. “Gone in 60 Seconds” is a
cold, calculated piece of summer-movie machinery, and one that
isn’t much fun to watch.

In Rosenberg’s rewrite, the plot centers on legendary car thief
Memphis Raines (Nicolas Cage) who’s lured out of retirement in
order to rescue his younger brother Kip (Giovanni Ribisi),
who’s followed in his sibling’s footsteps but with far less
success. In order to save young, callow Kip from a death
threat from his ruthless employer Raymond Calitri (Christopher
Eccleston), Memphis finds himself forced to try to heist fifty
vehicles in a single night–all of them, of course, rare and
expensive items. In order to succeed he recruits a crack team,
including his grizzled mentor Otto Halliwell (Robert Duvall),
his ex-girlfriend Sara Wayland (Angelina Jolie), and a couple
of cool dudes called Kenny and the Sphinx (Chi McBride and
Vinnie Jones, respectively), as well as Kip and his own gang.
The rest of the flick tries to squeeze some tension and
excitement out of their attempt, employing lots of pseudo-hip
dialogue, splashy visuals, lowbrow humor, elaborate car chases
and sporadic bursts of sappy sentiment in the process, while
intercutting the dogged pursuit of the miscreants by hard-
boiled but fair cop Roland Castleback (Delroy Lindo) and his
boobish partner (Timothy Olyphant).

Needless to say, the gang, despite some stumbles and close
calls, wins out in the end (shaggy Kip even shaves to indicate
that he’s been turned from the Dark Side by the experience);
the filmmakers aren’t so lucky. Though slickly made and
generating periodic bursts of energy, the picture is curiously
slack apart from its decently executed but decidedly obvious
action set-pieces; the scenes of exposition and conversation
are handled dully, and since the characters are all stick
figures, one can never really develop any concern for Memphis,
Kip, or “Sway,” as Ms. Wayland is affectionately called, or for
any of the secondary figures either. Even the essence of the
story–the systematic theft of the various cars–is poorly
handled. There’s little sense of the complexity or difficulty
of the operation; members of the crew just use various miracle
mechanisms to locate the requisite vehicles, pop their locks
and drive happily away. To be sure, a few chases occur,
but most of them involve a rival car-theft ring who are
depicted as Keystone Krooks, as it were; it’s only toward
the close that an extended pursuit is staged, and it seems so
familiar (with hints of “The French Connection” and “Terminator
2,” among others) and spottily edited that it doesn’t work the
magic the makers clearly intended. It may also be noted that
the picture never raises any moral issues involved in the life
of stealing on display here; we’re just supposed to identify
and sympathize with the career criminals who serve as its
heroes, despite the destruction and pain they cause others.
(One of the cute touches in the press notes is that they
tell us about the first car owned by each cast member and
high-ranking member of the crew; it would have been useful
if they’d also included some comment from the individuals
about how they would have felt had their precious autos been
stolen.)

Given the thinness of the script, it’s hardly surprising that
the cast fares poorly. Cage’s performance is all ticks and
flourishes without any solid grounding–but what could one
possibly expect of anybody playing a character who talks
lovingly to automobiles (when Memphis caresses a much-loved
model with soothing words, it’s the most ridiculous stuff
heard onscreen since Robert De Niro rhapsodized about thinking
like fire in 1991’s pallid “Backdraft”). Ribisi is anonymous,
and Jolie is required to do little but look sluttish, something
she manages with apparent ease. Eccleston, as the Brit heavy,
seems even more lightweight than Dougray Scott was in “M:I 2,”
and Robert Duvall does the same crotchety routine that he
used in the similarly slick-and-trashy “Days of Thunder” back
in 1990, and with equally dismal results. McBride and Jones
get some easy laughs, and Lindo does his tough guy shtick
professionally. But the sole member of the cast who seems to
get anywhere beneath the surface is Will Patton as an old
partner of Memphis who’s now working for Calitri; he’s in only
a few scenes, but he manages to bring a hint of pathos and
nobility to the scraggly fellow nonetheless.

So this spiffy, buffed-up 2000 version of “Gone in 60 Seconds”
might gleam like a showroom star, but it turns out to be the
same rickety old jalopy as the 1974 model; a sparkling
new coat of paint may have been slapped over the deep-rooted
rust, but the crate still idles badly and quickly runs down when
pressed. By the halfway point much of the audience will be
wishing that the title had referred to the running time; but
it actually logs in at a full two hours, unconscionable given
the flimsiness of the material and the shallow efficiency with
which it’s been mounted.