What I think does explain it is the plot. The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave are, technically speaking, plotted, but a large amount of essential absurdity is built into both plots. As Liza said, "Who in the world would ever invent mechanized trousers?" One could also ask, "Why should the same plot that centers around mechanized trousers also involve a jewel heist and a penguin called Feathers McGraw?" Similarly, in A Close Shave much of the delight derives from things incidental to the plot, such as the extremely elaborate sequence in which Wallace prepares to go out to his window-cleaning job, and Gromit's innovative approach to getting at those hard-to-reach windows. Whereas here, aside from the foundational joke about it being chickens escaping from a farm rather than POWs escaping from a camp, there isn't as much of that inspired absurdity. It's as if the prospect of an 85-minute film made them decide they needed a more traditional, coherent, linear plot; and for all I know, they were right. But that decision does mean that a lot of the film is devoted to character development through dialogue, and although I normally champion this sort of thing I'm not sure it's a strength of the Park-Lord team. Gromit, after all, is probably their most engaging and well-rounded character, and he doesn't speak; his character is expressed entirely through movement and facial expression, two things that most of these chickens somehow seem to be short of. The dialogue is usually pretty cute, but it's not laugh-out-loud funny most of the time, and there are some outright misfires, like the team of thieving rats who you can tell are supposed to be comic relief but most of the time don't make you laugh.
Then again, there is the possibility that I'm just less susceptible to the kind of humor that this plot does incorporate, much of which is conceptual (the visual resemblance between chicken farms and POW camps, for instance, whcih is lost on me as I have no experience of either; the fact that Rocky the rooster is, well, cocky), or based on puns, which most of the time were not bad enough for my taste (although I did blow a gasket laughing at an extremely obscure and no doubt elaborately prepared pun on "chocks away!").
All right, well, I shouldn't just whine about how it's not Wallace & Gromit; after all, if this film does well enough they will eventually release the full-length W&G film they are said to be working on, so I should start giving people reasons to buy tickets. And there are plenty. For one thing, if you have to put Mel Gibson in a film, this is the way to do it. As Rocky the Rhode Island Red, Gibson plays a belittled and ironized version of himself--a wisecracking American heartthrob whose self-vaunted physical prowess is a smokescreen covering a quivering core of pusillanimity and self-absorption. He is, predictably, nudged into a romance with the plucky and resourceful Ginger, which is slightly annoying in that she's really too good for him, but handled pretty well in that Rocky is never allowed to steal the show from her. There are points at which the animation does make you share the emotions of these unfortunate chickens (the most effective of which takes place in silence, supporting my earlier point about dialogue vs. visuals), which helps the final resolution produce an emotional payoff. As a Star Trek fan, I cannot fail to sing the praises of Mac, the chicken version of TOS's Scotty--whose Scots accent, unlike Doohan's, is so authentic that her dialogue has to be translated for Rocky ("I swear she's not usin' real words"). And whatever zip the film's first hour may lack, the last 25 minutes pack a fair amount of gut-busting hilarity, especially a scene that takes place inside a giant pie machine, and the final sequence, during which even the rats (with the help of some plaster garden gnomes) become hysterically funny. It's here that they finally achieve that special kind of inspired lunacy we associate with the Knit-O-Matic and Feathers McGraw, and even in proportionally small doses that's something that would make me willing to pay money to see this movie again. Maybe it's too much to expect a film to keep up that standard over an hour and a half, especially when you consider how horrendously complex and time-consuming stop-motion animation is. Or, maybe we can blame the relative blandness of Chicken Run on Dreamworks. I'm always up for that.
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