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(Review originally written at 23 February 2007)

Perfect fun story, perfect fun characters and perfect fun jokes. How could someone not love this movie?.

Best way to describe this movie is "The Great Escape" with chickens. It sounds silly and of course the movie also is just that. It perfectly and amusingly spoofs classic prison camp movies, most notably of course "The Great Escape" and "Stalag 17". Yet the movie knows to become more than just a spoof and it creates its own identity, with its own humor and other strong points.

The biggest power of the movie is that is intendedly ridiculously made made, with silly looking characters and lets face it, also a silly story but everything is yet made very seriously. The contrast of that makes this movie work out very amusing, hilarious and also most definitely exciting. The two big action sequences form the highlights of the movie. It are sequences any other normal serious action would be jealous of.

The movie is really great looking. This was the movie that introduced claymation to the main stream audience. Quite amazing once you start thinking about how this movie is made, purely with the use of clay and stop motion effects. This movie definitely raised the bar for future claymation projects. The characters are fun animated and look really over-the-top. The look gives every characters its very own identity and personality.

The characters are all great ones. Especially the villainous and human characters of the movie Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy are great. Mrs. Tweedy is an excellent deliciously over-the-top and stereotypical movie villain, perfectly voiced by Miranda Richardson. Also all of the chickens are highly amusing and originally brought to the screen, with Mel Gibson and Julia Sawalha as the voices of the two main characters.

The humor is fun and understandable for kids but especially great for the adults. It's the subtitle of all of the humor that really makes this movie such an hilarious one. So yes, I can recommend this movie to the kids but I can perhaps even recommend it more to the adults who perhaps even more shall enjoy watching this movie. This movie is irresistible to watch for everyone.

The story is kept simple so it always remain understandable and the movie easy and pleasant to follow. It all is done in a good quick pace with some nimble editing and good camera-work.

The musical score from Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell, who already did some great work together on the other animated movie from DreamWorks "Antz", is just brilliant. It's so totally brilliant and action like spectacular and uplifting for the entire movie, that it again is in contrast with the silly aspects of the movie. It in a way makes the musical score also hilarious, just because it's so brilliant.

It all makes the movie simply nothing short of brilliant as well as extremely entertaining.

The movie that made me fall in love with Aardman Animations.

10/10

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About Frank Veenstra

Watches movies...writes about them...and that's it for now.
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