The best cartoons have never been for children. The kind of bizarre, exaggerated, outside-of-reality zaniness that celluloid allows when not using live actors makes animation the perfect medium for adult comedy. The great animators who have stood the test of time have always understood this. Max Fleischer understood. Tex Avery understood. Bob Clampett understood. Chuck Jones understood, and still does.

Nick Park knows it too. Creator of the acclaimed "Wallace and Gromit" shorts, and a man who gives the expression "detail-oriented" a completely new dimension, Park has created the first Claymation adult comedy about a concentration camp.

In theory, CHICKEN RUN pays tribute to the POW camp films The Great Escape and Stalag 17. In fact, the film is about a death camp, resembling Auschwitz in its slaughter of those unfit for work, more so than a prisoner of war camp. Amazing what animation lets you get away with. In this case, said death camp is Tweedy's Farm, where they raise chickens for producing eggs. The Tweedys have always been egg farmers, but the evil Mrs. Tweedy (voiced by Miranda Richardson and looking like Norman Bates' mother having a really bad day) has other ideas.

Ginger (Julia Sawalha, best known as the endlessly aggravated daughter Saffron on TV's Absolutely Fabulous) is the leader of the hens at Tweedy's Farm, and regularly holds meetings to reveal the latest escape plan. At the film's beginning, Ginger is digging out of a chicken pen that resembles a war camp with a teaspoon, only to be caught and tossed into the vegetable bin as punishment. Here she whiles away her time "on holiday" idly bouncing a brussels sprout as ditzy Babs (Jane Horrocks, AbFab's "Bubble") knits and hopes her friend is having a good time. After every release, abetted by items procured from (appropriately) rats Nick and Fetcher (Phil Daniels, Timothy Spall), she starts concocting another plan. Meanwhile, a crusty old gent named Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow), imagines himself as commanding officer over this clucking herd. That Fowler is presumably the sperm donor for all these hens goes unsaid.

Plan after plan fails, as the situation becomes more dire, since the evil Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) is bemoaning the miniscule profits associated with egg farming, and has started culling the herd, with low-producing hens being slaughtered for dinner. One day, an advertisement commiserating with said miniscule profits catches her eye, and she decides to go into the chicken pie business, aided by one of those Rube Goldbergian contraptions that are the bellwether of the Wallace and Gromit shorts. The situation appears dire until a cocksure (sorry) fellow by the name of Rocky (Mel Gibson), a white-meat barnstormer, just happens to fly in from a stint at a traveling circus, his seeming ability to fly giving the hens real hope for escape.

If CHICKEN RUN had been concocted by Will Vinton or another practitioner of American claymation, it would probably have been either horribly tasteless (pardon the pun) or hopelessly maudlin. In the hands of Nick Park, it carries a dry British wit, extending even to its irrationally silly title, that makes it that rare gem -- a movie that's great for children, who won't get most of the jokes, and their parents.

Each of these hens is representative of the archetypes you've seen in every movie set in a prisoner of war or concentration camp. Babs is the hopeful one, who prefers to remain blind to what's actually going on around her, refusing to believe that atrocities can take place, even when her intellect knows otherwise. A nonproducing hen is culled from the coop, beheaded (off camera) and eaten, while Babs says hopefully, "Perhaps she's just on holiday." Bunty is the pessimist. Mac, a spectacles-wearing mechanical genius, is the zany one, the Corporal Klinger of the group, if you will, with a Scottish brogue that exists for the sole purpose of the obligatory Star Trek reference, as well as for the fact that Scottish accents are inherently funny. These hens have a certain peculiar Zen wisdom. When placid Babs inquires as to why Ginger keeps trying to escape, and the latter asks, "Laying eggs all your life, then getting plucked, stuffed and roasted is good enough for you, is it?" Babs merely shrugs, states "It's a living," and returns to her knitting. The poultry puns come fast and furious, and so do the sexual double-entendres. I won't spoil it for you by enumerating them, you'll have to find them for yourselves.

Vinton's clay figures gain their facial expressions solely from the raising and lowering of their eyebrows. Park's figures, all of which have Wallace's wide mouth, which gives them a constant air of astonishment, convey a myraid of facial expressions and emotions even including a slow welling of tears. In an extraordinary suspension of disbelief, we forget after a while that we're watching twenty-six individually posed Plasticene tableaux for each second of film. These characters seem vibrantly real, from Ginger's single-minded urgency to flee to Rocky's swaggering bravado, which cracks to reveal the equally enslaved chicken within.

The production values are impeccable, from the faux-military music, reminiscent of the theme from Hogan's Heroes, that plays over the opening credits, to the beautifully-rendered sets, to a marvelous sequence involving a Rube Goldbergian pie-making machine that was undoubtedly invented by Wallace (with Gromit shaking his head during the process). Mr. Park may be an obsessive-compulsive eccentric, but he's certainly found the perfect outlet for his meticulousness. And if it means that all the female characters are either villainous and emasculating (Mrs. Tweedy) or sex-crazed (the hens), well, so be it.

CHICKEN RUN is the first film of the summer that doesn't insult the intelligence of its viewers. In a summer full of dumb action flicks and fart joke movies, this little gem is a don't miss.

Just be sure to stay for the closing credits.

- Jill Cozzi

Review text copyright © 2000 Jill Cozzi and Cozzi fan Tutti, © 2003 Mixed Reviews. All rights reserved. Reproduction of text in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express written permission of Mixed Reviews or the author is prohibited.

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