So which did come first, the chicken or the egg?

If you want to get technical about it, dinosaurs laid eggs millions of years before there were any birds at all, ergo, the egg came first. Of course, if you're the type to bring up facts like that, you're probably too unpopular to find somebody willing to argue with you anyway.

On a semi-related note, I still haven't seen Disney's Dinosaur, but I'm going to see Chicken Run about six more times this week.

Not since the first Toy Story has an animated film kicked me in the ass so hard. Wow! I'm still picking feathers out of my stool.

From the first rate direction to the fully engaging characters, Nick Park proves once again that he is the Prometheus of the 21st century.

No, wait... Prometheus was the fire guy. I meant Pygmalion, the clay woman guy. Crap, and that was supposed to be my Entertainment Weekly quote...

Chicken Run is the story of a dozen fat, bowling-pin shaped mounds of earth-tone clay that are forced by their oppressors to either lay their daily quota of eggs or end up surrounded by taters and gravy in a chicken pot, chicken pot, chicken pot pie.

As much as I loved this movie, I must admit, I can't remember what happened in about the first twenty minutes. It was the opposite of Titan A.E.. The animation was so good that it actually distracted me from what was going on.

Speaking as someone who's done stop-motion animation before, I remind you to take into account just how incredibly mind-numbingly, soul-wreckingly difficult this movie had to be to produce. It's not like hand-drawn or computer animation where you have key poses to work from and you can refine your work and fix mistakes. Unless there's been some startling innovation in stop-motion animation that I'm not aware of, the animator pretty much just has to move the model, shoot the frame, cross their fingers, and hope that everything comes out right in the end.

To have the whole feature animated so well without so much as a thumbprint on Rocky's feathery butt every now and again just broke my brain.

As did the pure Britishness of the whole thing. You've got to remember that this film was made by Aardman Studios and is technically a foreign film. Hmmm, a foreign film with no German techno that got five chainsaws? What are the odds?

I don't know about you, but it took my feeble colonial mind entirely too long to wrap around a language that is, all things considered, virtually identical to the one that I speak.

Mr. Tweedy - Blimey. Let's 'ave a look around in dat dark chicken coop.

Mrs. Tweedy - Right. Get a torch.

Mr. Tweedy - A torch? Cripes luv, iddn't that a bit of ovakill? A flashlight would do nicely.

Mrs. Tweedy - This is England. A torch is a flashlight, stupid git.

Mr. Tweedy - Ahh, I see. And so that weird cursive "L" symbol on da side of da moneybag, that doesn't mean dat it belongs to Laverne DeFazio?

Mrs. Tweedy - You are a wanker.

And speaking of nationality brain-teasers: How come Australian Mel Gibson gets to be the only American character? Are real Americans really so repugnant to the British that they have to simulate us with somebody from down under?

All in all, Chicken Run is a solid five-chainsaw movie. There was no riding the fence (pardon the... pun?) on this one. If there's one thing that's true of people of all ages, races, and nationalities, it's that a rubberized chicken equals entertainment.

They built an airplane. They built a freakin' AIRPLANE!

I must say, I didn't see that coming. Since chickens, in fact, CAN'T fly, I was expecting some kind of silly, heartwarming ending where due to some undetected accident (breathing helium, stepping on spring loaded mines, explosive propulsive flatulence, etc.) the chickens would end up believing in themselves and "flying" over the fence as if Jiminy Cricket himself was putting Prozac in their feed.

Building an airplane was a totally unexpected, and satisfying way to get to the happy ending.

And considering what an impressive (and no doubt, expensive) puppet the "crate" was, I give fourteen and a half thumbs up to the marketing people at Dreamworks for not putting it in any of the promotional material. It's the opposite of the giant spider from Wild Wild West where you said to your friends, "Hey! I want to see that movie with the giant mechanical spider! I think it's got Will Smith in it too!"

What I didn't like, however, was the inclusion of every poster tagline as dialogue in the film. I mean, maybe it's okay for those of you fortunate enough not to live in Los Angeles, but I've been seeing "The Lone Free Ranger" and "She's poultry in motion" plastered to the side of every building, metro bus, and gang member that I've encountered in the past four months. When they started rattling them off in the movie it just made me cringe.

And what of Rocky? He was supposed to be the textbook Three Amigos semi-hero who is mistaken for something that he's not, yet in the moment of truth saves the day. Although he did return after running away to hide his ineptitude, he didn't really have anything to do with saving the day at all. It was all Ginger's plan and the hard work of the chickens that did it. Rocky didn't even fly the silly thing. Outside of just being an extra set of hands to help out a little, Rocky didn't do, er, chicken shit.