It's unlikely that Steve McQueen would have ever thought he'd be immortalized by a chicken (and a female one at that), but that's what has happened in Chicken Run. When we first meet plucky heroine Ginger (Julie Sawahla), she is continually trying to escape from Tweedy's Egg Farm, where she and her fellow feathered friends are egg-producing captives. Every time she escapes, however, she is caught and put in solitary confinement -- a trash can -- where she tosses a baseball against the wall with McQueen-like grace a la The Great Escape.

In their first feature film, claymation kings Peter Lord and Nick Park -- of Wallace and Gromit fame -- offer a darkly comic fable about a desperate group of chickens who, like all prisoners, yearn for freedom and are willing to do whatever it takes to attain it. While Chicken Run has Lord's and Park's trademark dry humor and typically bleak digressions, it lacks the vitality of their short films, making us smile and laugh but not really feel.

The premise here is simple, but Lord and Park find plenty to fill up the screen time. Ginger and her compatriots find the answer to their escapist prayers when Rocky the Flying Rooster (Mel Gibson) drops into their roost. With a broken wing that needs to heal, Rocky agrees to teach the ladies how to fly, if they hide him from his circus manager. Thus begins a clever tale of funny, failed flight attempts with the conflict between Ginger and Rocky at the core. Screenwriter Kirkpatrick has zeroed in on the humanity between these two lovebirds, and their slowly evolving relationship is as well-developed as that in any live action feature. Likewise, the secondary characters provide ample diversion, especially nasty egg farm owners Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) and her hen-pecked (literally) husband Mr. Tweedy (Tony Haygarth).

Yet, despite all its finer points, there is still something indefinable that's missing in this film. Perhaps it's that chickens don't leap to one's mind as being funny animals. Monkeys sure, ostriches absolutely, but chickens? It doesn't help that, as constructed, the creatures herein -- with their human-esque hands and tooth-filled mouths -- don't even look much like chickens. They are certainly charming, but they create an odd distance between the audience and the characters. There's also the fact that, given the premise -- escaping from a barbed-wire stalag -- the setting is naturally confining and, thus, not very dynamic. And, it could also be that, with all the paeans to World War II prison movies, one feels like we've seen this film and its gimmicks before, albeit with people not birds.

One thing Park and Lord do right, though, is their craft itself. No one can make claymation look like these guys do. The detail is exquisite and the sheer manpower needed to bring this film to life is all up there on the screen. Among the more outstanding sequences is the Pie Machine escapade; it is brilliantly rendered and one of the high points of the film. If anything, go see Chicken Run for the spectacle of clay coming to life, but, with chickens that look a bit too human and an arena that doesn't offer much room for surprises, don't expect the same originality that characterized Wallace and Gromit.