The Great Escape with chickens???

That’s about what it comes down to. In this sometimes amusing, more often soporific story — yet another entry in this summer’s big “animation contest” — we have an entire stalag — excuse me, I mean “farm” — full of hens (and one superannuated rooster, who was once an RAF mascot). They are kept in small coops and forced to do a daily roll call by the farmer, the ineffectual but sometimes perspicacious Tweedy (voice of Tony Haygarth), and his wife, the vicious Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson). Their job: lay many eggs (one hen boasts of five in one day — this is unlikely; as a boy, I kept chickens, and I know better). Continued failure to do this job means that you will be Sunday dinner.

Leader of the escape attempts is Ginger (Julia Sawalha), a hen of parts (most of them unfortunately edible); but all her attempts end in failure until she meets visiting American rooster Rocky (Mel Gibson), who can — she is led to believe by an incomplete circus poster — fly. She extorts a promise from him to teach all the chickens on the farm to fly. But they have to move fast; Mrs. Tweedy has been doing the books, and finds that the egg-production business is nowhere near as lucrative as the chicken pie business would be. So she has a chicken-pie-maker installed, a marvel of modern technology, and from this point on it’s a race to get Over the Wire…

I almost fell asleep in spots. When I was awake, I watched the pictures of naked lady chickens doing calisthenics and kept thinking of roast drumsticks. Only during the final fifteen minutes did I come fully awake as The Great Escape finally played out. (The chickens do fly over the fence, just not exactly in the way Ginger originally thought they would…)

Out in the lobby after the film, I noticed a stack of film canisters already labeled for return — Dinosaur and Gone in 60 Seconds. I expect that this film will be joining them in a couple of weeks.