Ginger is a chicken, the only one with more than half a brain on the Yorkshire chicken farm, run by a ruthless Mrs. Tweedy. The future looks gloomy for her fellow chickens, as one of them is made into a dinner for not producing an egg in five days. Ginger is obsessed with finding a way out for all of them. Of course, as the story goes, the attempts are futile, and invariably end with Ginger's captivity and solitary confinement, not entirely unlike the one depicted in The Bridge over the River Kwai. The morale-boosting arrival of Rocky, the flying rooster is evened out by Mrs. Tweedy's business decision to transform her egg farm into a chicken pie factory. Time becomes of essence, and Ginger has to work even harder to unite the clueless chickens under the mutual cause.

Although it is set as a drama, the absurdity of claymation gives Chicken Run the comical foundation. Flyboy Rocky is voiced by Mel Gibson, who is not beneath using his Braveheart "Freeeeeddoooomm" scream. His chemistry with stubborn and determined Ginger effortlessly transcends into a romance, and the originally ignorant hens evolve into an organized force with one goal. The fact that it is a British invention helps Chicken Run in being a sort of an off-beat, weird comedy, and its style and look defy any comparisons with the American animated movies. It's not as clean and crisp as Disney's products, but it has an undeniable charm. The art of claymation not only advances to matching mouth movements to the dialogue soundtrack, but it goes beyond make-believe characters and makes us forget that we're not watching real actors. The characters are uncommonly diverse; besides Ginger, there's a particularly stupid chicken (sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?), a engineering genius chicken, aging rooster with the military background and a couple of rats who help with the logistics.