- Adorkable: Babs, what with her clueless, bumbling demeanour coupled with her cheerful attitude.
- Allegedly Optimistic Ending: The chickens have finally escaped from Tweedy's farm and Mr. Tweedy finally gets his revenge on Mrs. Tweedy for abusing him, although his farm is a mess, he’s an accomplice to Mrs. Tweedy’s animal cruelty, and his attempt to murder his wife would be most likely he’ll be going to jail when the police would arrive to investigate it.
- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Is Rocky a Jerkass who lead the girls on false promises and turned their backs on them, only to have a sudden attack of conscience that prompts him to return, or is he a sympathetic man (or rooster) who was put into this situation by a goal driven-chicken who would stop at nothing to get what she wants, and gets treated like a Jerkass even though he, technically, never lied in the first place?
- Edwina apparently never told the others she hadn't been laying any eggs. Was it because she didn't want them to worry about her, or did she deliberately keep quiet about it because she wanted to die?
- Did the door fall on Mrs. Tweedy by accident as a result of the gravy explosion? Or was Mr. Tweedy finally tired of the abuse she constantly put him through and pushed the door down himself deliberately? This was the case in an early cut of the film, and it's not helped by how awkwardly the scene was edited. You can even interpret Mr. Tweedy's gestures as the door falls as either him pushing the door onto her and waving goodbye with his fingers or reaching after the door as it topples over in a futile attempt to grab it and raising his hand to his face as if taking in what just happened since he is seen from afar, leaving his gestures vague enough for interpretation. In the Italian dub after the door falls over he's heard shyly asking "Mrs Tweedy?", so the Italian translators went with the latter.
- Was Mrs. Tweedy truly evil? Or was she just running an honest business and took a little too much pleasure in keeping her chickens in line, but otherwise was just doing what was necessary to supply the populace with eggs, like all other factory farms? And let's face it: who wouldn't become bitter over having to get by on minuscule profits?
- It's also questionable if Mr. Tweedy is that much better than his wife: while he's clearly not the sadist that she is, it's doubtful that he or his ancestors were ever any more merciful to the hens that couldn't lay anymore. And given his correct suspicions that the chickens are intelligent enough to be plotting an escape, the fact that he has no ethical qualms about continuing to enslave them for eggs or killing them when they couldn't is even more inexcusable than it was for Mrs. Tweedy, whose actions could have been interpreted as Obliviously Evil up to a point.
- Also, Mr. Tweedy's abusive behaviour towards the chickens, even when Mrs. Tweedy isn't around (such as in the beginning where, after tossing Ginger into solitary confinement, he yells at the chickens that they won't escape). Considering the abuse he receives from his wife, is it possible he's taking his frustration out on the chickens? Or perhaps he genuinely blames them for his abuse, as a lot of it comes from Mrs. Tweedy believing her husband is an idiot for thinking the chickens could be "organised".
- Babs. On one end, one would think she's as dumb as she acts, but when we see her panic at the idea of ending up like Edwina, it's possible she's not really that stupid. Instead, her air-headedness is her dissociating from life on Tweedy's farm.
- Aluminum Christmas Trees: Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy each referring to each other by their shared last name and respective gender titles rather than using their first names is reasonably common among older couples, especially amongst certain branches of Christianity and in rural areas of the US and Britain.
- Animation Age Ghetto: The film aimed at both adults as well as children, but was billed as being explicitly a children's film and given a G rating by the MPAA. The producers attempted to avert this by dropping a character from the early scripts named Nobby (who was supposed to be Ginger's little brother, and thus the Kid-Appeal Character) in order to avoid being excessively cute.
- Applicability: Ginger's Rousing Speech has been interpreted as pro-libertarian, their blight being a metaphor for how human lives improve when completely divorced from an inherently obstructive government. Others have read it as Marxist, that the chickens are the proletarians to the Tweedy's bourgeoisie, if not as a direct criticism on the inhumanities of capitalism — the chickens are being led to their deaths in the name of minuscule profits, after all. It can also be read as Anarchist in that the chickens represent the people who create and maintain the anarchist society with the Tweedy's standing in for the state who run everything; the film even ends with the chickens running their own society in a bird sanctuary.
- Award Snub: Despite critical acclaim, a determined campaign from Aardman and preference by a number of Academy Award voters, the movie failed to gain a Best Picture nomination. This would result in the creation of the Best Animated Feature category the next year.
- Awesome Music:
- Following their triumph with the Antz score, John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams made this score, possibly the best score to ever feature a 15-piece kazoo choir. Seriously, Chicken Run's OST is one of the most memorable, entertaining and at times even epic music you'll ever hear in an animated feature, and deserves a listen alone even if you should never watch the film. Take Main Titles
and Building the Crate for example. - "Flip, Flop and Fly" performed by Ellis Hall, heard during the dance scene, also counts.
- "Into the Pie Machine" is an absolute thrill to listen to as you just picture Ginger and Rocky trying to survive the various death contraptions accompanied by said music.
- "The Chickens Are Revolting" is magnificent.
- Following their triumph with the Antz score, John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams made this score, possibly the best score to ever feature a 15-piece kazoo choir. Seriously, Chicken Run's OST is one of the most memorable, entertaining and at times even epic music you'll ever hear in an animated feature, and deserves a listen alone even if you should never watch the film. Take Main Titles
- Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Mr. Tweedy's line after throwing Ginger back in the coop is usually quoted as "No chicken ever escapes from Tweedy's Farm!" In the movie he just says "no chicken escapes" and doesn't use the word "ever."
- Catharsis Factor: Mrs. Tweedy getting her pie machine exploding in her face and her husband pushing the broken barn door on her is satisfying to watch, since she’s mean to the chickens and Mr. Tweedy has gotten the best of her.
- Easily Forgiven: Rocky's punishment for having lied to the chickens for days on end, making them train for nothing, wasting valuable time that could have been spent on other escape attempts and then abandoning them all to end up as slaughter is... a slap to his cheek, immediately followed by Ginger trying to kiss him instead, as she explains is for "coming back". The other chickens don't even react to him returning other than "aww"-ing at the two's Big Damn Kiss. Then again, Rocky just saved Ginger from Mrs. Tweedy as well, spurred them on to take escaping seriously in the past, and they're presently in the middle of getting away, not giving the chickens much chance to interact with him, and it can be assumed he properly apologised to everyone once they landed.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: Babs. Not only is her joy contagious, but she has easily the funniest and most memorable lines in the movie.
- Evil Is Cool: Mrs. Tweedy manages to be one of animation's scariest villains despite being a mere Yorkshire farmwoman, from coldly taking sadistic pleasure in terrifying and killing her chickens, to when she has a full on Villainous Breakdown at the climax and is reduced to screaming incoherently as she climbs the Christmas lights on the flock's plane and attempts to murder Ginger with an axe. She rarely has comedic moments (mostly just being a Deadpan Snarker to her less intelligent husband), and makes any scene she's in much darker.
- Harsher in Hindsight: Babs knitting a noose is dark enough to begin with, but the noose's pink and light blue bands resemble the transgender pride flag (a minority with a high suicide rate).
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Mac's full name is supposedly "McNugget Mac". Now, taking this into account, of all fast food companies, guess which one both Aardman and DreamWorks partnered up with to promote the movie. That's right, Burger King!
- After The Stinger, Fetcher says "The rats are the stars, actually." Come six years later and Aardman and DreamWorks would make a film focused on rats.note
- Many years later, and another film with talking birds would also make a reference to A New Hope.
- Ho Yay: Nick and Fetcher seem to be a little closer than just being Those Two Guys and Heterosexual Life-Partners.Fetcher: (Practically swooning) Wanna dance?
Nick: (Long, thoughtful pause) Yeah, alright. - Iron Woobie: Let's just say Ginger has to put up with a lot over the course of the film.
- Jerkass Woobie: Mr. Tweedy. He may be enforcing the farm's harsh rules on the chickens but considering all the abuse he takes from his predominant and nasty wife, who seems to go out of her way to break his spirit, and being made out to be paranoid when the chickens really are organizing an escape, it's hard not to pity him.
- Just Eat Gilligan: While the arrival of the pie-making machine was inevitable, Rocky could have saved a lot of heartbreak had he just told the hens from the beginning that he can't really fly (he tries to tell Ginger after the dance scene, but by then, they had already gotten their hopes up and their disappointment would have been more painful than it needed to be).
- Like You Would Really Do It: Ginger's comb can still be seen after Mrs. Tweedy apparently decapitates her, making it obvious that the attempt failed.
- Love to Hate: Mrs. Tweedy. She is for sure a frightening and sadistic tyrant of a chicken farmer, as well as a Domestic Abuser towards Mr. Tweedy (and implicitly towards her dogs as well, given how fearful they are of her), but Miranda Richardson gives her an awesome and intimidating performance and she is at least capable of being a threat when she tries to prevent the chickens' escape (in addition to being quite durable enough to survive a few deadly mishaps), which makes her a great Aardman villain to root against.
- Memetic Mutation: Mr. Tweedy's line "Those chickens are up to something" has gotten its share of mileage on The Internet, with "chicken" often replaced by a different target of suspicion.
- Misaimed Merchandising: Despite the film being about chickens trying to avoid being turned into food, Burger King restaurants in the US and Canada promoted the film by adding airplane-shaped chicken tenders to the Big Kids Meal menu.
- Moral Event Horizon: She had been imprisoning them in her farm since day one and killing them when they can't lay any more eggs, but Mrs. Tweedy crosses it when she decides to cook each of them into chicken pies. Alternately (since this much can be put down to Obliviously Evil until she finds out for sure that the chickens really are as intelligent as her husband suspected), she crosses it by trying to thwart their escape in the crate.
- No Problem with Licensed Games: The 3D game based on the movie is a pretty good stealth game (Metal Gear Solid with chickens!) with exciting levels and fun mini-games.
- One-Scene Wonder: Edwina doesn't even get any lines (excluding a squawk as Mr. Tweedy grabs her) before she is killed by the Tweedys for not producing enough eggs, but her presence sets the stakes by showing why the chickens need to escape the farm, and how dire their situation is. There's also the sheer amount of implications and interpretations on why she chose not to tell anyone she hadn't been laying any eggs when doing so would've saved her life.
- Retroactive Recognition: The film includes Imelda Staunton, Miranda Richardson, and Timothy Spall, all of whom would become better known (at least in America) for their work in the Harry Potter films. Ironically, Spall's role in the Potter films was also a rat!
- Special Effect Failure:
- The explosion of the pie machine is represented with some very obvious late 90s CGI used for the geyser of gravy it produces.
- In the shot of Ginger on the roof just before she looks up at the passing flock of birds, there's a noticeable amount of "chatter"note on her brow.
- Spiritual Adaptation: The premise revolves around a prison-like meat farm that cruelly mistreats its workers on the verge of bankruptcy, so the head of the business resorts to selling the workers as food, leading to an escape. This sounds like Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, doesn't it?
- Superlative Dubbing: The Norwegian dub used a hilarious cast of women giving nearly all the chickens different dialects and accents. Perhaps it's the 'style' of the original dub to have the chickens speak in a calm and low manner, but the Norwegian cast seemed to give a lot more emotion to every line and they clearly had a blast dubbing it.
- Unfortunate Character Design: The chickens' bodies consist of two bulbous hips and cylindrical torsos. If you only look at their bodies from the shoulders down, they look like, well, let's just say, a cock. Even the female ones.
- Values Resonance: Mrs. Tweedy's abuse of her husband is not Played for Laughs, and he's treated quite sympathetically. He even gets a The Dog Bites Back moment afterward.
- Viewer Gender Confusion: It's hard to tell that Mac is female, because she's a tomboy and speaks really fast in technical jargon. Then again, it's established there's only one rooster (Fowler) in the coop.
- What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Despite the film's G rating, the movie does have quite a dark tone. Frequently cited is the scene where Edwina is beheaded, which gets about as close to showing the death as its rating allows.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
- The movie has a lot of applicability regarding just whom, if anyone, the farmers and chickens are meant to represent. As Aardman's films are generally apolitical, MST3K Mantra is probably the way to go.
- Ginger and Rocky's argument of motivating people the American way ("Don't mention death") versus the implied English way ("Always tell the truth"), however, is a much less ambiguous dig against American politics' alleged lack of transparency.
- Woolseyism:
- In the original version, when Mac speaks to Rocky for the first time, he asks "Was that English?" to reference her heavy Scottish accent. In the Swedish dub, he instead asks "Was that Norwegian?" when she speaks heavily in a Jämtland accent. The joke is that while Swedish and Norwegian are similar enough, the differences in grammar/vocabulary they do have can make communication tricky at times, hence Rocky's response.
- When Mr. Tweedy picks up Ginger and tells her "I've got a score to settle with you." the Norwegian dub decided to use the phrase "I've got a hen to pick with you" (the Norwegian version of "I've got a bone to pick with you"), making it a perfect Pun.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/ChickenRun
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