Beside obvious differences in animation, the comparison of Free Birds to 2000’s Chicken Run is still an inevitable one — both concern the coup, if you will, of rebel poultry plotting escape from institutionalized slaughter. Chicken Run, you’ll remember, concerns a domesticated flock and its struggles to stay out of the pies produced at the farm operated by Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy. Its plot looms largely at the surface and is centered on the group’s immediate survival (and Mel Gibson’s, as Rocky, libidinous effect on hens), ever hindered by the Tweedy’s evil schemes.
In Free Birds, we meet Reggie (Owen Wilson), an inquisitive turkey and a loner, raised on a traditional poultry farm and doomed for slaughter. When he becomes the lucky, sole turkey to be pardoned by the President on Thanksgiving, he’s whisked away to Camp David — and the lap of luxury — where he cultivates a fondness for bathrobes, Telemundo and home pizza delivery. The brawny, freedom-fighting Jake (Woody Harrelson) — who bears resemblance to Foghorn Leghorn, similarly statured and birdbrained — soon kidnaps Reggie on a quest to travel back in time to “get turkey off the holiday menu for good.”
From here, though Free Birds follows a familiar conflict-suspense-resolution formula, the movies diverge in their themes, and it’s not just a leap in plot structure (from a linear time frame to an elliptical one) that distinguishes the two; it’s the added emphasis on the major food issues of today, like sourcing awareness and recent trends towards vegetarianism. Where Chicken Run aims to save just a farm of fowl, Free Birds attempts, and eventually succeeds, to re-write the traditional holiday meal entirely, thus saving an entire species from enduring centuries of its best-known demise — the Thanksgiving dinner table. The plight of farm animals, Free Birds seems to say, isn’t a just a one-off issue; it’s a subject worthy of radical transformation — at least on the animated silver screen.
If that seems a stretch for a children’s movie, it’s worth remembering that countless animated flicks, from Bambi’s famous forest fire to 1992’s rainforest-themed FernGully to the films of Hayao Miyazaki (in particular Princess Monoke, Spirited Away and Castle in the Sky), have broached similar issues with younger audiences. Like those movies, Free Birds reveals a glimpse of the harsh realities underlining its story (Jake was the soul escapee of a factory farm, for instance, where birds lived in cages stacked ceiling high) and beginning sequences hinge on Reggie’s acute awareness of his fate. That Free Birds is bolstered by Harrelson, a longtime vegetarian, and that, thanks to time travel, the traditional bird is replaced with noticeably-pepperoni free cheese pizza, is further evidence here.
Some early movie site comments have indicated this side plot will keep viewers and their families out of the theater, which would be a shame because Free Birds delivers on pure entertainment value, and most tots, lest parents fear they’ll return home with a new vegetarian on their hands, will likely follow the surface storyline without giving much pause to its darker themes. Action moves right along and characters are well-defined, ever ready with a joke. Amy Poehler is excellent as Jenny, Reggie’s sassy, quick-witted love interest, and George Takei is well-cast as S.T.E.V.E., the wise cracking time machine. Oddly, Free Birds makes the case for the enduring appeal of the jail-breaking fowl flick, and it’s this storyline that emerges the strongest, ultimately rendering the tale an underdog story, only covered in feathers.