If you’ve seen Shrek, you’ll know that it’s cheeky, loud, filled with pop culture references, and incredibly American, the movie in large part being a parody of animated Disney films. Shrek came out the next year and made $491 million against a budget of $50 million, more than twice what Chicken Run made. With Chicken Run’s success both critically and commercially, you would think Katzenberg would have Aardman Animations continue making films with the same British appeal Katzenberg initially found oh-so-charming. The film is bursting with personality and is so spirited and fun that it’s hard to imagine someone watching it and not having a huge smile on their face. Of course, the movie’s British nature is only part of the story: Chicken Run is also simply a great film, with splendid animation, likable characters, and enjoyable references to old movies like The Great Escape and Stalag 17. Florida Times-Union called the film “a paean to British eccentricity, equal parts cluelessness and hopefulness, full of English slang and dry Brit humor.” Roger Ebert called the film “a magical new animated film that looks and sounds like no other” and said one of the movie’s charms is “the way it lets many of the characters be true eccentrics (it’s set in England in the 1950s).” Variety Magazine praised the film for being “witty in an old-fashioned, veddy British way”. “Not only have people never seen a movie that looks like this, they’ve never seen a movie that talks like this,” he said. Thanks to the serious bank it made at the box office, this was a risk that lavishly paid off, as Katzenberg initially questioned whether the “Bristol English provincial-ness” would hinder the movie’s success or make it so wildly different that it immediately piqued interest and made it a must-see. “Do you literally know what it means? No,” he said. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation at the time, voted to keep all the British slang as he believed it gave the film character and an identity of its own. Characters say things like, “Codswallop!” “Poppycock!” and “I didn’t do ‘owt!”, as if audiences outside of the UK were supposed to know what all of that meant. You can very easily tell the creators were from the UK: Listening to the film’s dialogue is enough to get any non-British person’s knickers in a twist. Or maybe it was that Chicken Run was just so undeniably British.Ĭhicken Run was made by a British animation studio called Aardman Animations in partnership with DreamWorks Animation as part of their five-picture deal. A ton of reasons could be given for its success - maybe it was the incredibly high praise from critics, or movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas piquing interest in audiences for more stop-motion animated films. During its release, it was also the highest-grossing DreamWorks Animation film of all time, making $227 million against a budget of $42 million. It’s been 23 years and no film has been able to dethrone Chicken Run as the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time.
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