'Chicken Run' Turns 20, But Nick Park's Aardman Movies Remain Timeless [Be Reel Podcast]

“Chicken Run” (2000) turns 20 years old this week, and to celebrate, Be Reel looks back at the filmography of Nick Park, the chief creative voice of Aardman Animation through its heyday.

To understand the origins of Park’s world, we first rewind to the original, Academy Award-winning “Wallace & Gromit” shorts: “A Grand Day Out” (1989), “The Wrong Trousers” (1993) and “A Close Shave” (1995). In these shorts, Park and company establish their style and purview as artists embedded in a sleepy post-WWII North England aesthetic. And going back to “Creature Comforts” (1989, they also immediately give voice (or at least perspective) to animals and their plights in the industrial world. We also see the origins of what we’ll call “steam dad”—a genre of animation that allows for unlimited invention (mostly in a basement) by repurposing the staples of suburban life to extraordinary ends.

After “Chicken Run”—a DreamWorks spoof on “The Great Escape” as well as the oppressive nature of industry vs. nature, but, you know, with chickens—Park takes the characters of his earlier short films and gives them the Hollywood treatment in “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (2005), a somewhat unfocused and gothic take on a vegetable pageant and how far Wallace and Gromit can push themselves in the gig economy.

Then, as Aardman and Park move away from DreamWorks, we discuss “Early Man” (2018), Park’s latest feature. This recent film presents the endlessly debatable question of how CGI factors into claymation filmmaking, and whether the charm of seeing everything done practically wasn’t half the joy of Park’s visions.

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