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August 12, 2020 8:03 AM Subscribe
Elle Summers publishes a cracking good commentary [youtube]"what an appropriate time to analyse the power of collective action" in the film "Chicken Run".
She's fantastic, and this makes me love Aardman that much more!
posted by pt68 at 10:16 AM on August 12, 2020
posted by pt68 at 10:16 AM on August 12, 2020
One of my outstanding failures as a parent is that I can't get my kids (who love animation, & loved Wallace & Gromit) to watch Chicken Run. Maybe they'll watch this analysis...
posted by sneebler at 10:16 AM on August 12, 2020
posted by sneebler at 10:16 AM on August 12, 2020
There is apparently a Chicken Run 2 on its way to Netflix. Sadly, collective action has not stretched to the producers welcoming back the female lead, Julia Sawalha, who they believe sounds 'too old'.
posted by biffa at 12:00 PM on August 12, 2020
posted by biffa at 12:00 PM on August 12, 2020
I think this film's basic socialist underpinnings, with the patriotic British coat of paint and idyllic countryside ending, all echo Blake's Jerusalem. The chicken pie machine ~ These dark satanic mills.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 12:59 PM on August 12, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 12:59 PM on August 12, 2020 [1 favorite]
This is a grossly underrated film and I'm glad it's still being watched.
The most interesting thing about it that Summers has missed—I suspect because she's too young to know the significance of endless, endless TV reruns of them on one of four channels—is that Chicken Run is the last of the great tradition of Anglo-American POW movies, which was a genre completely based on characters solving collective action problems. I'm not sure why the genre's declined but I have suspicions.
Because Aardman are such clever pastiche artists, it's tender and knowing. Chicken Run is socialist and English, but it fits firmly in the kind of collective-escape tradition started by Stalag 17, a play written during the war in which the villain is an informer, and in The Colditz Story, and most of all The Great Escape. The basic elements are more or less the same: Allied POWs attempt to escape or resist their prison camp and have to bridge differences and organise themselves to do it. There's usually an officious enemy officer, there's mostly a great march tune in the soundtrack, there's always a climactic escape scene. The obvious text was international cooperation and derring-do, but the implicit subtext was also about class—they're boys' own stories of officers and leaders, and leadership, since there was no expectation that ordinary soldiers should escape.
Summers gets this absolutely right, about why the animation works: the chickens as workers, and as a single-sex female social group, is clever and subversive, and a wink to that boyish Douglas Bader tradition, and Mel Gibson's casting as the heroic American is a knowing touch. In Bridge Over the River Kwai that homosocial aspect excluding women is explicit, in drag, as is the class relationship between officers and men. In Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence it's something rather more.
The genre lent itself to pastiche-parody from the start and Hogan's Heroes is only the most famous; the Ripping Yarns episode Escape from Stalag Luft 112B has all the ingredients, and Stephen Fry is perfectly cast in the surprisingly sophisticated Stalag Luft, as an English gentleman who too-easily becomes a sadistic anti-semite. Every scene in which Indiana Jones is chased by Nazis is a baseball-cap tip to Steve McQueen's motorcycle jump.
But the interesting figure here is James Clavell, who wrote King Rat (and lots of other more or less Orientalist novels in the ripping-yarn tradition), and who had himself been a prisoner of the Japanese. He leaned politically Right, in later life became a devotee of Ayn Rand, and King Rat is unusual in that it's the collective action problem in reverse, individual over class—the main character is either a villainous gangster set against the group, or a survivor and leader set against British class hypocrisy, depending on your view. But writing the screenplay to Paul Brickhill's Great Escape, he couldn't escape the appeal of the cooperation, collective activity narrative that Summers is describing. It's compelling, and post-war audiences wanted the story over and over again.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:34 PM on August 12, 2020 [12 favorites]
The most interesting thing about it that Summers has missed—I suspect because she's too young to know the significance of endless, endless TV reruns of them on one of four channels—is that Chicken Run is the last of the great tradition of Anglo-American POW movies, which was a genre completely based on characters solving collective action problems. I'm not sure why the genre's declined but I have suspicions.
Because Aardman are such clever pastiche artists, it's tender and knowing. Chicken Run is socialist and English, but it fits firmly in the kind of collective-escape tradition started by Stalag 17, a play written during the war in which the villain is an informer, and in The Colditz Story, and most of all The Great Escape. The basic elements are more or less the same: Allied POWs attempt to escape or resist their prison camp and have to bridge differences and organise themselves to do it. There's usually an officious enemy officer, there's mostly a great march tune in the soundtrack, there's always a climactic escape scene. The obvious text was international cooperation and derring-do, but the implicit subtext was also about class—they're boys' own stories of officers and leaders, and leadership, since there was no expectation that ordinary soldiers should escape.
Summers gets this absolutely right, about why the animation works: the chickens as workers, and as a single-sex female social group, is clever and subversive, and a wink to that boyish Douglas Bader tradition, and Mel Gibson's casting as the heroic American is a knowing touch. In Bridge Over the River Kwai that homosocial aspect excluding women is explicit, in drag, as is the class relationship between officers and men. In Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence it's something rather more.
The genre lent itself to pastiche-parody from the start and Hogan's Heroes is only the most famous; the Ripping Yarns episode Escape from Stalag Luft 112B has all the ingredients, and Stephen Fry is perfectly cast in the surprisingly sophisticated Stalag Luft, as an English gentleman who too-easily becomes a sadistic anti-semite. Every scene in which Indiana Jones is chased by Nazis is a baseball-cap tip to Steve McQueen's motorcycle jump.
But the interesting figure here is James Clavell, who wrote King Rat (and lots of other more or less Orientalist novels in the ripping-yarn tradition), and who had himself been a prisoner of the Japanese. He leaned politically Right, in later life became a devotee of Ayn Rand, and King Rat is unusual in that it's the collective action problem in reverse, individual over class—the main character is either a villainous gangster set against the group, or a survivor and leader set against British class hypocrisy, depending on your view. But writing the screenplay to Paul Brickhill's Great Escape, he couldn't escape the appeal of the cooperation, collective activity narrative that Summers is describing. It's compelling, and post-war audiences wanted the story over and over again.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:34 PM on August 12, 2020 [12 favorites]
Don't think she missed it, she just didn't focus on it. She says near the start of the video that it's based on The Great Escape.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:13 PM on August 12, 2020
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:13 PM on August 12, 2020
Chicken Run is the last of the great tradition of Anglo-American POW movies, which was a genre completely based on characters solving collective action problems. I'm not sure why the genre's declined but I have suspicions.
Probably for the same reason that most other cultural changes brought about by World War 2 have faded: it's no longer in living memory
posted by Merus at 3:02 AM on August 13, 2020
Probably for the same reason that most other cultural changes brought about by World War 2 have faded: it's no longer in living memory
posted by Merus at 3:02 AM on August 13, 2020
Fiasco da Gama, I expect that she'd love your discussion and she seems to be open to communicating on her page.
posted by mightshould at 4:16 AM on August 13, 2020
posted by mightshould at 4:16 AM on August 13, 2020
It's not like there haven't been POWs since WWII, though.
posted by saturday_morning at 10:56 AM on August 13, 2020
posted by saturday_morning at 10:56 AM on August 13, 2020
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posted by hat_eater at 9:15 AM on August 12, 2020