Chicken Run

The Tweedys are a middle-aged couple who run a struggling chicken farm somewhere in Yorkshire, England, circa the 1950s. Mrs. Tweedy (voiced by Miranda Richardson) is the ill-tempered (she suffers mental breakdown) brains of the pair, while Mr. Tweedy (voiced by Tony Haygarth) is much less intelligent but can readily do the farm's manual work. The coop is run in the style of a World War II POW camp, with the chickens accountable for the number of eggs they lay daily. Their unofficial leader Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha) has attempted numerous escapes, often using contraband smuggled in by a pair of rats named Nick and Fetcher (voiced by Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels). However, Ginger is routinely captured by Mr. Tweedy and his dogs and is later thrown into a coal bin for solitary confinement. Ginger is released from the bin just in time for roll call the next day, when Mrs. Tweedy removes one chicken who has laid no eggs for a week and kills her with a hatchet for the Tweedys' dinner. Ginger becomes increasingly desperate to find a plan of escape which will work, but faces problems with Nick and Fetcher, who are tired of being paid with chicken feed and want their own eggs instead.

Mrs. Tweedy soon realises that the couple's farm is failing and reads a catalogue on an ambiguous method of increasing profits. Realising something is wrong, Ginger attempts to rally the other chickens' spirits so they will speed up their efforts to escape. However, she soon concludes that their only viable plan is to go over the fence, something that has not been tried yet. As she sits outside the coop that night, she sees a Rhode Island Red cockerel named Rocky (voiced by Mel Gibson), who hurtles over the fence and crash-lands in the coop. The other chickens fawn over Rocky, while Ginger finds a torn section of a poster that appears to show Rocky flying. After Ginger discovers that Rocky is from a circus, she agrees to hide him from his owners if he teaches them how to fly. Rocky...