Director Peter Lord. © DreamWorks Pictures.

The Directors
Directors Peter Lord and Nick Park need little introduction to stop-motion fans. Lord co-founded Aardman with Dave Sproxton, though as Lord puts it, it was a matter of "Two schoolboys picking a name, little dreaming it would hang around so long." The pair's inspirations included Ray Harryhausen, Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations, and stop-motion TV shows such as The Wombles and Magic Roundabout. Aardman was the name of an inept hero in one of the teenagers' early cel sequences, bought by the BBC in the late '60s. Subsequently, Lord and Sproxton focused on plasticine/clay animation, mainly because no one else was working in the medium. The duo have animated numerous acclaimed shorts, many now available on Aardman video collections, while Lord was Oscar-nominated twice for Adam (1991) and Wat's Pig (1996).

It was Aardman's films that in turn inspired Nick Park, who invited Lord and Sproxton to give a lecture at the National Film and Television School where he was studying. At the time, Park was working on his first Wallace and Gromit adventure, A Grand Day Out, in which the duo go to the moon. After Park left school, he was invited to complete the film at Aardman (it was released in 1989). A wild success, it was followed by Park's short Creature Comforts (1990) and the Wallace and Gromit sequels The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995). All three won Oscars, with Comfortsbeating fellow nominee A Grand Day Out. Park subsequently joined Lord and Sproxton as company director of Aardman. (A common mistake, even promoted by the UK press, is that Park is sole manager or founder of Aardman, which is like saying Lord created Wallace and Gromit!)

Gripping a large, metal spoon, Ginger attempts to ride her way to freedom on a locomotive drill machine. © DreamWorks Pictures.

"The idea for an Aardman feature came up after The Wrong Trousers," says Lord. "It seemed a logical ambition, the next summit for Aardman to climb." There was discussion with Jeffery Katzenberg, who was with Disney at the time, but then things went cold until after Close Shave. The seed of Chicken Run was a doodle in one of Park's notebooks, showing a chicken digging under a wire-fence with a spoon, plus the idea of The Great Escape with chickens. "Armed with that, we started writing the story," says Lord. "Nick and I worked on it for the best part of a year before it became widely public. In that time we took the idea to sundry American studios and touted it around Hollywood style."

And why chickens? "Chickens are perhaps the most humble creatures on our planet," says Park simply. "Just think how often they're ridiculed in our language. It seemed natural to make a film about them."