The Chicken Runs, Pt. 1: Find Your Wings and Burn Them

Hello, guys, gals, and non-binary pals! I hope this email finds you in a well. Or however that goes. Welcome to the first real installment of Stupid Poetry, your number one source for a newsletter that is written specifically by me, Seth Thill.

Summer, once again, is coming to a close. Now I know none of us could have seen this coming. I don't know how it happens, personally. One day it’s warm out, maybe even hot, and then the next day it is not. What gives? I don’t know. Rest assured, I will be investigating this, but first, I want to do what I do every year around the time this happens. Reflect on another summer of Chicken Run. Now, for those who know me already, you’ll know how much I love this movie. It's a lot. Because of this, I have decided there cannot be just one Chicken Run post here on Stupid Poetry. And so this is the start of a mini-series I will come back to every so often called The Chicken Runs. Today, I just want to talk a little about what the movie means to me and leave you with a little poem about it.

For those who don’t have the date marked on their calendars, Chicken Run, the first and most successful of a series of collaborations between British claymation powerhouse Aardman Studios and Dreamworks, hit U.S. theaters on June 23, 2000. The film follows a group of egg-laying hens on a bleak Yorkshire egg farm run by the evil Mrs. Tweedy and the oafish dipshit, Mr. Tweedy. When Ginger, de facto leader of the chickens, figures out that the Tweedys have begun fattening the hens up for slaughter, she turns to Rocky, a cocky (pun intended), supposedly flight-capable American chicken who had crash landed at the farm (played by noted horrible shithead, Mel Gibson. I know. Not great). The film then follows Ginger, Rocky, and the rest of the wild, wacky, dare I say, zany, crew’s shifting plans for escape as their doom inches closer and closer. As I said, this is the first of many, many Chicken Run posts, so I won’t spoil the whole plot quite yet. But let this be your notice. Watch Chicken Run. This will be your only spoiler-free Chicken Run post.

What I can tell you right now is that when these chickens arrived on the scene, nothing was ever the same ever again. Chicken Run fever hit America like nothing we'd seen before. It would eventually face some stiff competition, but for a time it was arguably the most impactful historical event of the new millennium. It was a critical and commercial smash, and today remains the highest grossing stop-motion film of all time. Kids everywhere were foaming at the mouth, running in circles outside their homes and yelling “I love them chickens! They're funny and they’re British!" And you may be surprised to learn that I was right there shouting along with them.

I was only 5 years old upon the film’s release, but I already had a history with Aardman Studios, the British Production team led by Nick Park and Peter Lord, co-directors for Chicken Run. Aardman is, of course, also widely known and beloved for Wallace & Gromit, the cheese-loving duo from Lancashire. Trust me when I tell you I will be talking at length about these guys a lot in the future. There’s too much to get into right now, but let me just say I would die for Gromit and [redacted] for Feathers McGraw. My love for W&G predated Chicken Run, and though I don’t know that I conceptually understood what a production studio was when I was 5, I knew that them chickens kinda looked like Wallace and Gromit chickens. I remember day after day spent on the dingy brown carpet in our duplex staring at the TV, lighting up at every commercial I saw for the movie, or for the Burger King kids meals, which, well, uh, a little unfortunately, came with special airplane shaped chicken nuggets as a tie-in for the movie. You know, the movie about chickens fighting back against being factory farmed and also presumably eaten. Anyhoo.

This brings us to the film itself. I loved it then, as a shy 5-year-old with a bowl cut pretending to shoot myself out of Rocky's circus cannon, and I love it now, as a 30 year-old vaguely considering getting a bowl cut and joining the circus.

I want to be very clear. I am not being flippant or glib when I say this: I truly believe Chicken Run to be one of humanity’s crowning achievements. The sheer depths of creation and innovation that goes into any piece of claymation is staggering--a level of control over a created world that is impossible without both a singular creative vision and also the trust and buy-in of a dedicated collective. Directors Nick Park and Peter Lord drop us into this painstakingly constructed new world that looks a bit like ours but stranger in some ways, softer in some, and harder in others, and it instantly feels vivid and lived in.

From the initial crawls across the dismal, broken-down and splintered henhouses our protagonists are kept in, reminiscent of actual POW camps, we have this contrast with the bright, fascinatingly distinct clay chickens who are fighting to preserve themselves. We meet an entire fleet of characters built from scratch--not just the idea of them on a script, but their actual bodies, constructed from pieces of earth and manipulated with superhuman patience and tremendous care to come alive. A movie like Chicken Run is something that cannot come to be without the obsessive belief that it is within our power to make the world better, kinder, and more beautiful. It is daring to create a claymation chicken movie that parallels The Great Escape and captures the indomitability of the human (or chicken) spirit and value of community care in just 84 minutes. It simply has no right to be as good as it is.

There is a big laugh line in the movie that I have been thinking about a lot. Babs, my favorite hen, faints at the prospect of Mrs. Tweedy slaughtering the chickens to make into and sell as frozen chicken pot pies. When Babs comes to, she says, “All of me life flashed before me eyes!” before taking a beat and finishing, “It was really borin.’” It is a perfect representation of the movie’s dry British humor, but beyond that, it pits this admitted mundanity of a normal life against the dire existential threat at hand in a way that captures the essence of the whole thing to me. Babs’ life may be boring, but it's worth protecting nonetheless. She can't 'fly' like Rocky claims to. Her life has been spent in captivity serving the profit of someone else. But she's found union with the folks around her, and that is what you protect.

And so I wrote a poem about all that. And about shooting yourself out of a cannon and flying and about whether loneliness is an inherent flip-side to freedom or whether maybe or not the very definition of freedom I am used to using is maybe a more isolating version of freedom than real freedom is. And well, I want the poem to speak for itself mostly, but rest assured, it is definitely a mid-sized prose poem about watching Chicken Run. Here you go!

Cannons, Clouds, Chicken Run (2000)

I stepped through spilled popcorn on my way out of the movie theater. no attention paid to the grime on the handrail. spilled soda softened the carpet beneath my feet, and all i wanted was to shoot myself out of a cannon and i believed i could do it, i believed i could fly, or at least be thrown. I was 5 years old at the now walgreens, then Cinema Center 8 and I just watched Rocky the Chicken get shot out of a cannon and feel the shame of a circus freak for it but not quite the freedom of a circus freak and really the “freak” isn’t the problem but rather the “circus” and the constellations are impossible to track under candy-striped tarp. I guess you just shoot yourself at the wall and each time you don’t splatter is a moral victory. maybe your body can put holes in walls, in ceilings. maybe you one day run out of walls to put holes in. maybe one day the cannon makes you a star and maybe you belong where it sends you. maybe you just land, and maybe it doesn’t matter where. maybe your feathers are chain-linked to the rotted wood floor.

Ginger cries doom and doom feels like the airplane shaped chicken nugget I ate after the movie. we eat burger king kids meals at the arboretum and i shoot my plastic chicken from my plastic toy cannon. i got the exact one i was hoping for--Rocky the lone rooster who knew he could fly if he ignored how he did it. he downplays the doom like a man’s ego is supposed to and my own ego has forgotten its home. i pretended i didn’t hear the doomsayers when they were fattening our heads with cysts and tumors, with hopes and dreams, i didn’t question the airplane shaped chicken nuggets. why do we bother to hold trash can lids as shields when we become whack a mole, when they sell our death and bathe in our absence.

all the signs were there that the hammers were falling. we tried to catch them. all we wanted was to throw them back into the sky, to throw ourselves into the sky, to fly the coop, to find the moon but our heads were cracked. i choked on popcorn and chicken feet and i walked outside after the movie to a still-shining sun and i couldn’t yet name the dynamite on my back when i say it but i wanted to shoot myself into the sky. what i am saying is that the circus is wherever you drag the tent, that freedom is wherever you can paint your walls, that the tear in the big top’s fabric is the same you-shaped hole in your chest and the cannon is the lies you can’t quite fill it with, the cannon is the lie you are the lies you hide from the bone grinder, the cannon is the air that once knew stars, the cannon is aimed at itself. you look to the sky and light a match. it would all be so much easier if you’d never breathed the smoke, if you’d never swallowed clouds.

And that's all for this week, folks! Thank you so so much for starting this thing with me. We will keep going next week with some words on who else but those crazy masked fellow Iowan fellas in Slipknot. Talk to you then!