Chicken Run is the humorous story of a band of chickens who seek escape from their coop before their evil owners, the Tweedys, make them all into chicken pies. The film is an homage to the World War II prison films of the 1950s and 1960s (particularly The Great Escape), but it alludes wittily to numerous other films, including Braveheart and the Indiana Jones films.
The star roles in the movie are those of Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha), a hen who has absolute faith that the chickens can fly out of the coop if only they train hard enough, and Rocky (voiced by Mel Gibson), a rooster who Ginger believes can fly, but who keeps the secret of his flightlessness from her for much of the film. Mrs. Tweedy (voiced by Miranda Richardson) is the nefarious, grasping farm wife whose exasperation at low profits from egg sales leads her to reinvent her farm as a chicken pie factory.
The film proved a success with both children and adults, and showed that Peter Lord and Nick Park had the ability to handle the technical and writing challenges posed by a feature film.