Throughout the film, Park and Lord toy giddily with our received notions of chickens as cowardly and feckless creatures prone to chaotic behavior. Ginger, who knows that each hen is doomed as soon as she ceases to lay eggs, refuses to cater to the flighty or complacent elements in her species' makeup. With the help of a bespectacled Scot with a tartan cravat, Mac; a muscular hen-of-the-masses, Bunty; and even a dim, constantly knitting nester, Babs, Ginger galvanizes her flock in one daring escape plan after another, all hatched in the aptly named Hut 17.

Only once does Ginger contemplate defeat: "The only way out of here is wrapped in pastry," she moans. She redefines what "pluck" would mean for chickens. With her beak clamped in determination and two knobs of her hen's comb jutting out from under her green watch cap like a "V for victory" insignia, she's the rare regular-gal movie leader who's as charismatic as a showboat.

To wax Aardmanesque for a second, if she'd played Eisenhower or Bradley in "Patton," George C. Scott would not have been the whole show. The highest-ranking officer in the military pecking order is Fowler, the rooster who calls roll each morning instead of merely cock-a-doodle-doo. But Ginger is the planner and energizer who gets her hordes to follow her because of her truthfulness and gumption. Sure, when American cockerel Rocky improbably soars onto Tweedy's Farm, he becomes the center of attention -- partly thanks to Ginger, who believes that he'll be able to teach her and the rest of the chickens to fly. And yes, Rocky does play the typical role of Yanks in Anglo-American escape movies: He remains upbeat or breezy when the weight of Ginger's honesty gets too heavy for the room.

But Rocky takes his licks long before the picture is through. "Pushy Americans, always showing up late for every war," growls Fowler almost immediately. "Overpaid, oversexed and over here!" The lighthearted fun that "Chicken Run" has with "The Great Escape" is rooted in the way Park and Lord and their screenwriter, Karey Kirkpatrick, make all the Anglo-American conflicts gleefully explicit. Rocky, the McQueen-like cock of the walk, is a bold, highflying loner whose theme song is "The Wanderer." But he's also an incorrigible glad-hander and opportunist. His hedonism is part of his charm: Nursing a broken wing in a makeshift Jacuzzi as a bevy of hens caters to his whims, he resembles Walter Huston lolling in a hammock among the geishalike Mexican beauties of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

Unlike America's favorite cartoon superhero, Superman, Rocky the superchicken doesn't put truth and justice at the top of his priority list. His version of "the American way" is to tell the public what it wants to hear. Although he may be right that hard-boiled Ginger needs some softening up, it's Ginger who holds the coop together when Rocky's shortcomings crash their collective hope. Yet the movie remains, in its own chickeny fashion, a romantic adventure comedy -- or maybe an adventure comedy romance. It climaxes with a slap, a tickle and a clinch.

Since the Bristol-based Aardman animators have come to be viewed in Britain, as Park sheepishly admits, "as a national treasure," their decision to team up with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg at DreamWorks has been a source of suspicion on the home front. But Park and Lord share as much with the Spielberg of the Indiana Jones movies as they do with the Katzenberg who helped produce "Beauty and the Beast" -- indeed, Rocky and Ginger's flight through a chicken-pie-making machine out-Indies Indy. And throughout, the sustained flights of physical comedy recall how much of America's slapstick and screwball traditions came from transplanted English music-hall performers like Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant.

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