Hit Me With Your Best Shot - CHICKEN RUN (2000)

  Este post foi escrito para a série Hit Me With Your Best Shot do blogue The Film Experience de Nathaniel Rogers, sendo que, tal como na semana passada, é aqui apresentado em inglês ao invés do que é usual neste blogue.

 It’s interesting to watch a film you once watched as a child and revisit it with a new, much altered perspective, especially when faced with such a challenge as to pick a shot from the film itself and find some sort of justification.

 Before watching Chicken Run again, I tried to remember something about the film, maybe trying to capture some lingering nostalgia I had for it. But alas, I barely had any lasting recollection of the animated comedy. Well, that’s not completely true, I recalled quite clearly the sequence inside the pie machine, as well as the death of a chicken that happens very early in the film. Surprisingly early. But apart from that I don’t think I was that clouded by the nostalgia goggles of childhood. Eventually, though, I found out the film was mostly what I expected. Charming, entertaining, delightfully english, and, to my endless delight, curiously morbid and even sinister.

 And there’s also the visuals and the animation, of course, with its softness and muted color palette. The mixture of round, soft and mostly appealing character designs with its detailed and bleak world is jarring at first, but it gives the film quite a striking look. And the character designs are truly delightful, especially the chicken with their roundness and their clumsy movements, not to mention the hilarious detail of the chicken’s teeth. While simple and definitely far away from any sort of naturalism, I found myself apreciating just how much expression the animators could create out of their characters, especially when considering some more serious moments in the film, Sorrow, fear and desperation delicately visible in their facial expressions, particularly in the case of our protagonist Ginger (Julia Sawalha). It's beautiful work,

 Unfortunately not all is good. I was very unhappy to revisit the film and find it catastrophically formulaic, at least in everything that deals with the character of Rocky, an american circus rooster voiced in the original version by Mel Gibson.This cocky character is the sort of lying heroic protagonist we’ve seen a million times before. His story of deceit that is bound to end in rejection and then finish with a heroic effort that redeems him, especially in the eyes of his romantic interest, is, to me, sickeningly predictable. It's especially sad considering a film that, excluding this character, is remarkably offbeat in tone and even in story. Honestly, after I watched the film, I kept wishing that the film was only about the desperate chicken on a prison escape plot.

 But why do I bring forward such negativity when talking about such a harmless, mostly enjoyable feat of Claymation? Because despite his annoying presence, my pick for best shot actually has a lot to do with Rocky.

Best Shot 

 It’s set inside a chicken pie-making machine and first of all, I have to point out how I appreciate the use of a good visual joke. I think, especially in animated comedies, that the use of the visuals to convey humor is much better employed than the use of something like puns, which the creators of this film seemed to believe to be the medium’s greatest sort of humor. Moving on... Rocky’s incompetence as an action hero (until the finale), is probably what I most appreciate about the character, and his clumsiness is put to great effect in this tense sequence. The shot actually works as a sort of tension diffuser, a comic relief moment in the middle of what is to me, the film’s most tense and altogether intense sequence.

 But it’s not just the use of visual humor that made me choose this shot, but also both its striking composition with its use of an overhead camera and geometrical design, and its undercurrent of morbidity.

 This is, after all, a film where our main characters are trying desperately to escape their fate of being murdered and then eaten by humans. Early in the film, as I’ve pointed out before, a chicken dies, beheaded by the villainous Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson). The film quickly establishes its high stakes, as well as the strange but well employed sense of danger and imminent death that impregnates every single moment in the rest of the film.

 Look at the shot again, look at the way all those pies bear a black silhouette of a chicken. Dark and deep against the pies roundness. Its a cemetery of pies turned into the tombs of chickens. The gravy of these ominous culinary confections looks almost like blood spewing from the black sillouette. Add to this, the ominous orange in the background and you’ve got a strikingly beautiful, and surprisingly sinister shot, that still appears in the film as a moment of simple and funny visual humor.