Chicken Run

The reading was Ken MacLeod's novel The Stone Canal, which is a precursor to The Cassini Division. It's a better novel, and it weaves together nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, downloading human minds into machines, and anarcho-capitalism into a coherent and exciting novel. It's terrific! MacLeod is becoming one of my favorite authors, and now I want to track down his first novel, The Star Fraction, which is not domestically available in the US.

Work has been the steady plodding of writing API tests. I'm working on a fairly difficult set of API tests right now, and have been making surprisingly good progress this week. I got stuck on them about a month ago, but it seems putting them aside to do other work has energized me to tackle them. I've also inherited our Quake 3 server an have been configuring it to my tastes.

Probably the most fun I've had this week has been going with Subrata and a cow-orker of his to see the new Nick Park/Aardman Animation film, Chicken Run. And boy, is it ever a lot of fun!

For those who don't know, Aardman and Park are know for making stop-motion animation (i.e., "claymation") videos. They're probably best know for the terrific Wallace and Gromit trilogy, though they have also done commercials in both the US and UK. The animation is amazing, but what really makes their work, well, work is the writing and the characters. Most of the characters have these sort of pained, toothy expressions on their faces, and the actors usually have the most British of accents, which lends the comedy (and oh, is there comedy!) a unique flavor (or maybe I should write "flavour"!).

Chicken Run is essentially a parody of war movies: It features a camp of chickens at Tweedy's Chicken Farm. The leader of the chickens, Ginger (voice of Julia Sawalha), keeps trying to find a way for them all to escape, but keeps getting caught by Mr. Tweedy (Tony Haygarth). One day, Rocky the Flying Rooster (Mel Gibson, an Australian pretending to be an American) lands in camp and Ginger persuades him to teach them all how to fly as a means of escape. Naturally this proves to be more difficult than Ginger expected. Meanwhile, Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) has decided to give up making marginal profits from eggs and buys a machine to produce chicken pies, making escape a necessity!

The film features a cast of funny characters, and very nearly a laugh a minute. The opening sequence of Ginger's dozens of failed escape attempts primes you for the remainder of the hilarity, which builds to a thrilling and appropriately ridiculous climax. And yet, despite making you suspend your disbelief, the film also manages to maintain a certain degree of verisimilitude, such as the old war-rooster who says, "Of course I didn't fly the plane; I'm a chicken!", or Ginger's observation that one or two chickens escaping from the farm is easy, but she wants to rescue all of them.

And the animation, well, you easily get over thinking about how much work it was to do all this clay animation (three years' worth, apparently) and are just amazed at the level of detail that went into the whole process. Sure, Pixar does basically the same thing only on computer, but who cares? Aardman is working in its chosen medium, and by god, it works just fine! It's no less technically impressive than any CGI in the movies today.

Yes, this is a wonderful film, and you should definitely go see it. It's a treat.

(See also Diane Patterson's review.)