YMMV / Chicken Run

• Acceptable Ethnic Targets: Americans. Naturally the one American rooster is lightheartedly made fun of in an English setting.
• Adorkable: Babs, what with her clueless, bumbling demeanour coupled with her cheerful attitude.
• 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. Did she not tell anyone because she didn't want them to worry about her, or did she do it deliberately 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.
  • 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 miniscule profits?
  • Babs. On one end, y'all would think she's as dumb as she acts but, when we see her panic at the idea of ending up like Edwina, maybe she's not really that stupid. Instead, her air-headedness is her dissociating from life on Tweedy's farm.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Mr Tweedy and Mrs Tweedy actually referring to each other as such rather than using their first names is reasonably common among older couples, especially certain branches of Christianity, in rural areas of the US and Britain.
• Animation Age Ghetto: Chicken Run is a semi-mature film, but was billed as a children's film. 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.
• 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.
  • "The Chickens Are Revolting" is magnificent.
  • "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.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Babs. Not only is her joy contagious, but she has easily the funniest and most memorable lines in the movie.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: After The Stinger, Fletcher says "The rats are the stars, actually." Come five years later and Aardman would make a film focused on rats.
• Ho Yay: Nick and Fetcher seems 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. With all the abuses he takes from his predominant and nasty wife, it's not hard to feel a bit sorry for him.
• Misaimed Marketing: 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 game based on the movie is a pretty good stealth game (Metal Gear Solid with chickens!) with exciting levels and funny mini-games.
• 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:
  • Ginger's comb can still be seen after Mrs. Tweety apparently decapitates her, making it obvious that the attempt failed.
  • 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 Animation speak for when something that's meant to be still is moving too much from frame-to-frame. 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.
• 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 Not Political?
  • The movie has a lot of applicability regarding just who, 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.
• The Woobie: It's hard not to pity Mr. Tweedy considering what he goes through with an abusive 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.
• 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.