Rocky makes a daring attempt to rescue Ginger from the Tweedy’s new pie machine. © DreamWorks Pictures.

"Computer animation is a big deal now," Lord agrees. "It's gone from a marginal, specialised area to a mainstream brand in ten years. Stop-motion's never really been mainstream since the days of Harryhausen, but I feel it's having a resurgence now. Chicken Run isn't spectacular in the blow-you-away sense of computer animation, where it's easy to have twenty thousand warriors rushing across the plain. It's more subtle than that, on the level of character. I think it's nice what we do is more human; you get tired of effects movies after a while." A rough version of the film's opening bears out Lord's point. It's a montage of Ginger's failed escape attempts, becoming increasingly outlandish and desperate. There are no jaw-dropping effects, at least to an audience used to Aardman's impeccable animation. What grips is the urgency, the pace, the atmosphere -- in short, the story.

"But we like spectacle too!" adds Park quickly. Indeed, the new film promises plenty of white-knuckle thrills, including a sequence in the tradition of Spielberg with conveyer belts, giant rollers and lots of blades. On new technologies, Park comments, "Computer animation would mean nothing if it didn't have good ideas, stories, direction and characters. Anyway, I think there's something very appealing about the use of plasticine. Every child has handled plasticine and relates to it -- it's so tactile, you can see the fingerprints. To see plasticine characters moving round in full animation is in some ways more impressive than computer animation, I think. It has an extra kind of appeal."

The Production
The final screenplay was written by Jack Rosenthal and Karey Kirkpatrick. Rosenthal has written for numerous UK film and TV titles, as well as co-writing the Barbara Streisand picture Yentl (1983). Kirkpatrick's credits include the cel Rescuers Down Under and the stop-motion James and the Giant Peach. The writer is now collaborating with Mark Burton on Aardman's second feature,The Tortoise and the Hare.

The music is by John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams, who scored DreamWorks' computer-animated Antz. They're supervised by Hans Zimmer of Lion King fame.

The directors agree there's "distinctly more dialogue" than past Aardman films (think how many of the studio's past stars were mute). Asked whether the script was complete before filming, Lord admits, "You could say without great inaccuracy we're still working on it. We intended it to be complete before filming. That was the plan. We thought, ‘We've got a long time, we'll get it all sussed, the script will be ready, ready, ready!’ But it doesn't work that way. Even now, about three weeks before the end of the shoot, it's possible a line or two will change. Certainly some shots have changed. The structure was tightly in place before the filming, but details and spoken words have changed a lot. It's a very fluid process."

At the time of writing (mid-April) the film is in its last weeks of production, with just a few shots to be filled. To house such an enormous production, Aardman took on new premises in the 'Aztec West' Business Park, eight miles from Bristol centre. The building is devoted to Chicken Run, while Aardman's regular output of shorts, commercials and TV work continues at its other sites. Neither Lord nor Park are doing any physical animation themselves. Instead their days are packed with approving rushes, consultations with individual animators and generally holding the film together. "A lot of the animators were quite inexperienced when they came," says Lord. "But now we learn from them, and some are quite brilliant. They're not technicians, but actors, performers. It's very collaborative in that sense." Not that a director's job is easy. "On a bad day we might cover ten sets," says Lord. "We'd be directing an action scene, a love scene, a slapstick scene -- it's mindboggling."