This 2000 hit is one of the best stop-motion animated films of all time.

The 1990s were a heyday for animation in film and television. The Disney Renaissance kicked off a race by several studios to appeal to audiences and build lasting franchises. Former Disney creatives and executives like Don Bluth and Jeffrey Katzenberg were major players in the game. And while many of these films focused on traditional hand-drawn animation, other methods were creeping into the mix. While stop-motion animation is one of the oldest animation techniques, if not THE older, but not one of the most widespread.

DreamWorks saw a clear opportunity to capitalize on this art form and turn it into an international venture. The chicken race (2000) was produced in collaboration with European and US companies with great success. And it was not until Little Shrek (2001) which the film was beaten as the highest-grossing DreamWorks film.

Chicken Run was directed by the creator of Wallace and Gromit

Also known as “claymation,” stop motion has been the method of choice for studios like Aardman Animations. The studio was founded in 1972 by British animators Peter Lord and David Sproxton. The two directors met at school and used a 16mm camera in their spare time to make home movies. Their first professional project together was for a BBC series called Vision on, made for deaf children. The series featured a Superman-like character called Aardman, who inspired the name of their studio. After moving their base of operations from Yorkshire to Bristol, they began to focus their efforts on adult audiences.

In 1990 one of their animated shorts achieved its first major artistic success. Creature Comfort was an adult comedy mockumentary that began in 1989 and featured a series of vignettes. The series spawned further work for the emerging animation studio in the form of British television advertisements for switchboards. Aardman animator Nick Park won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1990 for his work on Creature ComfortIn 2007, CBS attempted to broadcast an Americanized version of Creature Comfortreplacing all the original voices with American actors, but was pulled after three episodes. This is not a commentary on Park's work at all, but rather on the viability of the shorts in their original cultural context.

The now beloved characters Wallace and Gromit made their debut soon after the release of Creature Comfort. Before their first feature film, The Curse of the Werewolf Rabbit (2005), the man-dog duo starred in several short films. The first was “A Grand Day Out” (1990), then “The Wrong Trousers” (1993) and “A Close Shave” (1995). Both “The Wrong Trousers” and “A Close Shave” won Park two more Oscars. By the early 2000s, the two very British characters had endeared themselves to American audiences, becoming fair game in an international market. It would take a couple of years before their creators were approached by a major studio executive at a major US animation studio.

During the same period, Disney continued to release one hit after another in the United States. The entertainment giant also had its successes in using stop motion to tell its stories. With the release of Tim Burton The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996), Disney proved that they were capable of branching out into different forms of animation, and were able to garner huge box office numbers. However, Disney was not investing much time and effort into these types of films, considering the cost of production in both time and money they required. But diversifying their inventory was a surefire way to stay on top during the animation boom. Behind the scenes, there was a former Disney executive who wanted to take his studio to the next level and compete directly with Disney's predecessors.

DreamWorks wanted to use Chicken Run to recapture Disney's success

Katzenberg had wanted to collaborate with Aardman for some time, after watching their rise to success. DreamWorks began as a studio founded by Stephen Spielberg, Katzenberg and producer and media mogul David Geffen. While Spielberg had produced his own successful animated projects such as An American Tale (1986), We're Back: The Story of a Dinosaur (1993), and executive producer of Bluth The land before time (1988) — DreamWorks would be a collaborative effort that would last for years to come. DreamWorks was founded in 1994, and one of the earliest iterations of its logo featured the initials of its founders: SKG. The chicken race was a project between Aardman and the French company Pathé based in Paris. In fact, before DreamWork's involvement, the project had been in development for two years.

The chairman and founder of Pathé subsidiary Allied Films said Katzenberg was instrumental in securing DreamWorks a piece of the pie. Jake Eberts recalled, “I guess DreamWorks won because Jeffrey Katzenberg is an obsessive, persistent guy. He was deeply involved in the process.” If Katzenberg had learned anything during his time working in animation at Walt Disney Studios, it was how to spot a winner. And he wanted to make sure he secured the last winning talent in the business. He admitted, “I've been accused of this from time to time. I don't want to plead innocent. I've been chasing these guys for five or six years, ever since I first saw them. Creature Comfort.” And the reward for The chicken race he ended up proving him right.

The chicken race features an all-star cast of British favourites and American import Mel Gibson. Other notable voices include Miranda Richardson, Timothy Spall, Jane Harrockks and Imelda Staunton, who most recently played Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix series The crownThe idea for The chicken race It started out as a parody of the 1963 film The Great Escapeabout a mass escape of British Commonwealth prisoners of war from a German camp during World War II. The basics of the films are still pretty much the same: a group of chickens try to fly the henhouse to avoid being turned into pies by a sadistic farmer. A sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, was released in 2023, with much of the original voice cast not returning. It was released directly to Netflix in the United States

Chicken Run is DreamWorks' biggest hit to date

Incredibly, The chicken race quickly became the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film, not just for DreamWorks but in history. In its opening weekend, it placed second, behind Jim Carrey, Me, myself and Irene. An unfortunate turn for Bluth, whose star was falling with the poor performance of Titan AE Chicken Run had brought home an estimated $15.7 million in profits on its first release. It surpassed DreamWork's previous most expensive title, Ants had grossed $17.2 million in its 1998 opening weekend. The film still has a 97% rating with critics on Rotton Tomatoes and a 65% rating from audiences. Critic Roger Ebert gave it 3.5/4 stars, saying, “What I like most about the film is that it's not simply a plot puzzle to be solved with a clever escape route at the end. It's an observer of human (or chicken) nature.”

The chicken race
It was the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time at the time of its release in 2000.

The Chicken Race the success was surpassed the following year by DreamWorks' longest-running franchise, Little ShrekAnd while it took 23 years for the stop-motion film to get a sequel, Little Shrek recently announced a fifth installment in the long-running franchise. Although The Chicken Race success may have been largely forgotten by modern audiences today, it set the stage for a cultural icon in the form of the green ogre. Aardman Animations has since returned to its own creations, preparing to release another Wallace and Gromit film in late 2024. Wallace & Gromit: The Most Loved Revenge will be released Christmas 2024 on Netflix in the US and on BBC in the UK. The film was announced for 2022, marking “the first time since 2008” that Park has returned to his “most famous (and Oscar-winning) duo.”

The chicken race further proved that there is a place for stop-motion animation among general audiences. And Aardman Animations has kept the flame alive in house ever since, continuing to create and innovate with further releases such as Thrown away (2008), Arthur Christmas (2011), Pirates! On an adventure with scientists! (2012), and Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015). 24 years after the release of The chicken race, Audiences are certainly ready to see the return of cheese-loving Wallace and his clever but silent sidekick: Gromit.