DreamWorks has more than made up for its recent family debacle The Road to El Dorado with Chicken Run, the best children’s movie since the inception of the Toy Story franchise.  The premise – a unlikely blend of Nick Park’s quirky, Oscar-winning animation and British humor combined with the prison-break genre – hardly seems like the kind of thing a typical American family would drag their kids to on Saturday afternoon, but Run is the rare exception of a film that is extremely enjoyable across the entire demographic board.

Armed with clever television spots that rip off Gladiator (“The egg that became a chicken”) and Mission: Impossible 2 (read C:R-1), Run is set on Tweedy’s Farm, where a large group of chickens lives in constant fear of the low egg production that would enrage the farm’s diabolical owner, Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson, Sleepy Hollow).  If you don’t make with the embryos, you get the axe, and most of the chickens are happy enough to go along with the farm’s simple rules.  The one exception is a spunky hen named Ginger (Julia Sawalha, Saffron from Absolutely Fabulous), who spends her days dreaming up ways to escape.  It’s easy enough to for her to break out on her own, but Ginger is determined to take all of the other chickens with her, as well.  To get supplies for her schemes, she trades eggs with two entrepreneurial rats dressed in bad suits.

Run’s hilarious opening credits feature a montage of Ginger’s failed Wile E. Coyote-type escape attempts (featuring the funniest blueprints since Jay and Silent Bob’s drafts in Mallrats), each resulting in her being tossed into the coal bin by the henpecked Mr. Tweedy (Tony Haygarth) and his two vicious dogs.  One night, while Ginger is wallowing in self-doubt about her ability to rescue her friends, she encounters what appears to be a flying rooster that lands in the chicken compound.  The cock is Rocky “the Rooster” Rhodes (Mel Gibson, Payback), and as he streaks through the sky, he shouts “Freedom!” like Gibson’s memorable deathbed line in Braveheart.

Ginger and her mates see Rocky as their saving grace and agree to temporarily hide the rooster from his former keepers (a circus, where he performed as “The Lone Free Ranger”) in exchange for flying lessons.  Of course, roosters can’t fly, and the middle third of the film concentrates on the American Rocky scamming the British chickens by saying he’ll teach them everything he knows about flying.  Standouts among the other birds include a dimwitted knitter named Babs (Jane Horrocks, Little Voice) and a crusty ex-RAF rooster named Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow).

The need to escape Tweedy’s Farm is hastened by the arrival of a barn-sized machine that makes chicken potpies (“chickens go in – pies come out”).  The contraption is featured in a fantastic scene where Rocky and Ginger try to escape its gravy-slicked clutches.  It’s a better action sequence that anything in M:I-2 or Gone in 60 Seconds (but not Gladiator), and it made me incredibly hungry, too.

In addition to sharp marketing slogans (“Escape or Die Frying” and “Learn to Fly or Bake Like Pie”), Run is full of clever puns (like “It’s raining hen” and  “She’s poultry in motion”) and makes numerous references to other films (they meet in Coop No. 17 for their covert meetings, a la Stalag 17).  At one point, when it’s becoming clear that Rocky might be a scam artist, one hen loudly wonders if the rooster is even American (Gibson is from Australia).  And on the educational front, we also learn that chicken not only have teeth, but lips, too (one plays the harmonica).

Run was co-directed by Nick Park and Peter Lord, whose animated Wallace & Grommit won two Oscars for Best Animated Short.  The screenplay was written by Karey Kirkpatrick (James & The Giant Peach), who based the script on an original story by Park and Lord.  Run may be a little intense for some young children – especially the pie machine, and the fantastic finale, which I won’t even begin to describe here.  The “G” rating seems a little light here, considering the amount of cowering I witnessed during these two scenes.

1:25 – for good clean family fun