During the Animal Rights 2000 conference in Washington,
DC, several of us left for a couple of hours on July 2 to see Chicken
Run. Activists who had seen the movie praised it, and we'd leafleted at
some theater openings in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington, DC. So
I was excited, but leery. While one of the directors, Nick Park, was
telling interviewers about his horrible job at a chicken slaughterhouse
and about his pet chicken at the time named Penny, the other director,
Peter Lord, was making it his business to denigrate chickens in
interviews, and Burger King was messing with the movie by having the
Chicken Run chickens tell people to "Eat more beef and save the
chickens" in collusion with Aardman, the movie's production company.
The chickens in Chicken Run live in a 1930s style
"free-range" operation in scattered huts enclosed inside a barbed wire
fence that evokes, with effective expressionist imagery, a Nazi
concentration camp. It is the world of "No light, but rather darkness
visible" of John Milton's Paradise Lost.
Being kept only to lay eggs and then be killed, every
morning the hens must line up while Mrs. Tweedy, the owner of Tweedy's
Egg Farm, examines each hen to decide which one of them, having become
useless, will get the ax today. Mrs. Tweedy is a cruel and vicious
Cinderella's stepmother type of woman. Mr. Tweedy, her husband, is the
everyman type who follows orders. He sniffs around the barbed wire with
his slinking mad eyed junkyard hounds slavering at the end of their
leashes looking for signs of rebellion. Mr. Tweedy slams "bad" hens into
the trash bin. Mrs. Tweedy plots to make more money by installing a mass
production chicken-pie factory for the "spent" hens. Learning about
this, the hens redouble their efforts to escape, because as one hen says
for all the chickens, "I don't want to be a pie."
The hens are locked up with a blustering old rooster who
identifies ludicrously with his captors. Wearing a military uniform, he
barks out orders at the hens and imagines himself to have been a flying
ace in World War One. In this dystopia one individual stands out among
the rest, a hen named Ginger. She is the true leader of the flock, the
embodiment of their desire to be free. Her mind and will are focused on
a Great Escape, on how to sail over the barbed wire and get back to the
green world that chickens were meant to be in. She and the other
chickens have an ancestral memory of life outside the henitentiary.
In the midst of Ginger's plots, repeated frustrations
and refusals to give up, along comes Rocky the "Flying" Rooster, a
refugee from the circus who with his hotshot American-style breeziness
attempts to reinvent himself and hide his fear of recapture. Rocky
brings things to a head at the camp, but he is not the Hero of the Hen
Huts. Ginger is. It is her initiative and brooding consciousness, her
great sad eyes viewing the spectacle of the world, her burden of having
to keep everyone focused on the escape and not degenerate into fragments
of illusion and hopeless acceptance of fate, which constitute the moral
core of the movie. Ginger must grit her teeth -- in this movie the
chickens have the signature teeth of the filmmakers -- and refuse to let
human evil, the centrifugal forces and attrition of everyday life, and
her own despair destroy her or her plan to get herself and the rest of
the flock safe to the world of green grass. Ginger is a true Chickens'
Libber and we identify with her and with the plight of the chickens
completely. Neither Peter Lord's perfidious gibberish about chickens to
the media nor Aardman's sellout to Burger King changes the content of
Chicken Run, which rises above its creators and crummy circumstances as
do the hens at Tweedy's Egg Farm.
Unfortunately, the filmmakers have more in common with
Mrs. and Mr. Tweedy than they have with the prisoned chickens. And they
hide behind "art" and "entertainment" to give themselves an alibi to
betray the meaning of their own movie. But Chicken Run should be seen by
everyone and actively used to promote a vegan world and animal rights.
Karen Davis, President
United Poultry Concerns
www.upc-online.org
July 5, 2000
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