Chicken Run reworks the World War Two escape film as a story about hens on a Yorkshire egg farm run like a prison camp, who pin their hopes of freedom on a crash-landed American rooster claiming he can fly. Aardman's first feature, directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park, was shot in stop-motion across thirty sets over eighteen months and became the highest-grossing stop-motion film ever made, taking $225 million against a $45 million budget.
When a scheme to win the flock a day off sends their amnesiac farmer rolling into the city inside his own caravan, Shaun and Bitzer follow him into a world built for humans, disguised as people, while an animal control officer closes in. Richard Starzak and Mark Burton's stop-motion feature keeps the television series' silence intact across eighty-five minutes, betting the visual gag can hold a full plot rather than just a sketch.
Vengeance Most Fowl brings back Feathers McGraw, the silent penguin villain from The Wrong Trousers, who hijacks Wallace's new robotic garden gnome to rebuild his criminal operation and settle an old score. Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham direct from Mark Burton's screenplay, with Ben Whitehead voicing Wallace in his first feature appearance following Peter Sallis's death. Made by Aardman Animations, the film holds a 100% Tomatometer score, won the inaugural BAFTA for Best Children's and Family Film, and became the BBC's most-watched scripted broadcast since 2002 after its Christmas Day airing.