Park and Lord, the directors of "Chicken Run," have unbounded mutual respect. They project a joint awareness of the ironies and absurdities of showbiz and of the hard work and flickering wizardry of animation art.

I'm probably the perfect audience for this film: I think Nick's 1990 short, "Creature Comforts," is a work of genius. And in 1982, when British film magazine Sight and Sound conducted its yearly poll of favorite movies, I was the only critic out of 122 to put the original "The Great Escape" [from 1963] on my list.

Park: It is an amazing film, isn't it?

How did it happen that you combined "The Great Escape" with chickens?

Park: Well, it just seemed to be a marriage that was destined to happen. It came together kind of magically, you know.

But which came first for you, "The Great Escape" or the chickens?

Park: They actually came at exactly the same time. That was what we felt was special about the idea. It wasn't like we went looking for animals that could escape. And we weren't looking for a movie with chickens. Know what I mean? It wouldn't have worked if it was "The Great Escape" with beavers. And it wouldn't have worked if it was "The Sound of Music" with chickens. It wouldn't be quite the same.

For a long time we were looking for ideas because we wanted to make a feature. And Peter and I were sitting and drinking coffee -- pretty much like this, but we were also sketching -- and we just came up on the page with a sketch of a chicken digging its way out of a coop with a spoon. And we thought, "Gosh, this could be something we could run with." It's an idea that has legs, as they say -- or drumsticks. Sorry about that.

That's OK -- puns must be inevitable at this point. Critics are always talking about how you get emotion into your characters. I think you simply take the time to get at the emotion. You show characters reacting to events. Reaction shots are supposed to slow down the action and were thought of as passé 30 years ago. But in "Chicken Run," which is an action movie, you often focus on reactions -- even deadpan ones.

Lord: Yeah, well, the time when you're not animating is often the most valuable, isn't it? Yes, the screen time when nothing's going on. We often had trouble containing our animators and stopping them from doing too much. I think so much of live-action comedy is really based on knowing when to stop, or knowing when to pause and look and give an expression that undermines what you've just said or whatever it might be. And we're great fans of that. We're fans of letting the puppet -- or, i.e., the actor -- really work. This is almost kind of by the way, but I've often thought with animation that the very cleverest animation often lets itself down.

It's wasted effort, you know? I mean, you'll see two animators and one will do something fantastically busy and elaborate. Intellectually you think, "God, that's very clever animation; it's so subtle and difficult to do." And another animator will do the same movement in almost a whole series of stills, and the latter is more effective. The first one's cleverer, but the second one communicates better because you can see what's going on. You can see the face. If characters don't stand still, you can't look at their faces -- you can't see their expressions and then you can't see what they're thinking and feeling and you've lost the moment.

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