Nick Park made the studio internationally famous with immensely charming two-reelers about a stolid, cheese-loving inventor named Wallace -- who devises elaborate Veg-O-Matic-like contraptions for his own supposed comfort and convenience -- and his sane, long-suffering dog, Gromit, who holds the household together. The most expressive jut-jawed, marble-eyed and square-headed creatures in movie history, Wallace and Gromit have become icons of a cracked yet creative domesticity. But some think that Park's short "Creature Comforts," which matches whimsical zoo animals with words taken from humans with similar gripes (like nursing home residents or foreign students), is even more inspired. In the most ticklish scenes, a Brazilian exchange student who hates England vocalizes the frustration of a jaguar from the South American jungles -- a Latin relative of the Pink Panther -- who would gladly trade Anglo technological perks, like double-glazed windows, for green tropics, clear weather and space. It's primordially funny: one of the few cartoons of any kind that get adults to laugh as helplessly as kids.

Greenery, good weather and space are not so different from what the chickens want in Park's glorious feature debut, "Chicken Run," which he co-directed with Aardman's godfather, Peter Lord. But these birds aren't just dissatisfied -- they're fighting for their lives. The day a hen on Tweedy's Farm fails to lay an egg, Mrs. Tweedy decapitates the bird and cooks the corpse for supper. And when Mrs. Tweedy declares she's "tired of making minuscule profits," she happens on a magazine ad that asks, "Tired of making minuscule profits?" -- and purchases a chicken-pie-making machine that threatens to massacre her poultry in one fell swoop.

When these chickens shake their wings at Fate, what results is a soaring testament to the spirit of freedom-loving poultry everywhere, and a harrowing yet hilarious tribute to a hen's ability to endure -- and prevail. As you can tell, just trying to describe "Chicken Run" can put one into the state of euphoric silliness that must have engulfed Park and Lord when they first thought of redoing "The Great Escape" with silicone-and-Plasticine chickens. As the provincial hens, a grizzled Royal Air Force vet rooster and a cocky vagabond Yank unite to fly the coop, the co-directors operate at a plane where ingenuity meets genius.

You may not wind up believing that chickens can fly -- at least not by flapping their own wings. But you will believe that an escape-starved hen can mark time in solitary by bouncing a Brussels sprout the way Steve McQueen bounced a baseball in "The Great Escape." You'll even believe that a rooster can perform McQueen's trick motorcycle riding on a tricycle.

This movie's cornucopia of humorous riffs and stunts never fails to amuse or enthrall because it never ceases to be unexpected. More important, it stays true to Park and Lord's hands-on aesthetic. In an age of gratuitous technowizardry, this is largely a handmade film. It's like a cross between "Babe" and Terry Gilliam or Monty Python pictures (two of which, you might recall, were made for Hand Made Films, George Harrison's company).

When "Babe" premiered to wide acclaim five summers ago, dissenters regarded it as glorified kitsch. But if kitsch is marked by its refusal to acknowledge the grime and muck of mortality, "Babe" and "Chicken Run" are anything but. They may be full of barnyard humor, but they're full of graveyard humor, too. If Park and Lord stylize the birds in "Chicken Run" until they resemble doorknobs with spindly necks and legs, it's to make them more emotive and uproarious, not conventionally cuter. Adorned with what the Aardman gang calls "fluffles" -- scallop-shaped textures that suggest feathery skin -- these chickens have a surface like dented rubber kickballs, as well as malleable brows and oblong beaks full of teeth that tie them to Wallace and Gromit.

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