Beebfun - Chicken Run Desktop Theme Homepage

Welcome to

- we provide original Desktop Themes to download and enjoy on your own PC. For inspiration we have drawn on that great British institution - the British Sitcom (with the odd footie theme thrown in for good measure). With over 40 fun TV, movie and soccer desktop themes to choose from we are sure you will find some fun here. Be sure to visit the rest of this website (it's awesome) before leaving. Click on Frames or No Frames to access the main menu. The latest British comedy to sweep both the US and the UK - Chicken Run

Chicken Run is the brand new full length feature film from directors Nick Park and Peter Lord. In case these names sound familiar let me explain. Nick Park is the creator and Director that brought you A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave - the famous trio of TV animated films featuring Wallace and Gromit. Peter Lord is co-founder of Aardman Animations a Bristol based animated film company formed in 1972 on the back of a home made animated cartoon featuring the super hero Aardman (a not so super man) hence the company name. Inspired by some of Aardman's earlier creations, notably Morph, Nick Park joined Aardman Animations in 1995 with a part finished film story about a man and his dog who were cheeeeseee mad! Given this obsession with cheeeeseee where better to spend a few vacation hours than on a trip to the moon! From this simple story line A Grand Day Out was born and so were Wallace and Gromit.

Chicken Run, is a great escape story about a bunch of hens who are far from chicken! But first a little background....

Nick Park earned three Oscars for his work on the Wallace and Gromit trilogy and after the third Oscar Aardman were heavily courted by Disney Studios the main player in the animated film industry. In terms of relationship the proposal from Disney was, shall we say, all encompassing, which did not rest easily with the creative talents behind Aardman Animations. A rival studio, Dreamworks, hoping that Aardman could do for them what Pixtel had done for Disney with Toy Story, set about brokering a deal which meant that Aardman could hold on to a sense of identity. The deal, reported to be worth c. $150 million for a five picture commitment, gives the Bristol based studio a considerable degree of freedom in terms of creativity and output - an important ingredient for the creative talents of Nick Park and Peter Lord. Dreamworks were able to secure funding for the deal from Pathe and the collaboration between Dreamworks/Aardman/Pathe was born. The first movie to appear as part of this collaboration is Chicken Run and from initial sketches and storyboards work began on developing the idea of a chicken farm inhabited by plucky hens planning a great escape from a fate worse than fricassee.

3D animation on this scale requires a military style operation just like the full scale movies. A battalion of model makers churned out chickens with factory farm intensity. Although still drawing on the style of Wallace and Gromit, for the first time plasticine was partially replaced by hard wearing rubber skins stretched over metal skeletons. With all the joints of a real chicken, the puppets had to be engineered to withstand the 2 year filming schedule. Over 300 people worked on this film with up to 26 animators shooting sequences at any one time. The result is Aardman's first ever full length feature Chicken Run. Rumour has it that already in pre-production, Nick is eager to get back to the first love of his life and a full length feature starring Wallace and Gromit looks very promising.

Here are a few web links to other Chicken Run sites on the net. If you find others please let me know and I will add them here for subsequent visitors to explore.

Visit the Reel.com: Chicken Run - includes the trailer, an activity center, mailing list, downloads, and more.

Click Here to order the Chicken Run Fun Pack from Amazon.co.uk

The Chicken Run Fun Pack is a CD-ROM by Activision priced at £16.99 and available from Amazon.co.uk for Windows 95/98. If you are a desktop theme freak then this CD-ROM is sure to ruffle your feathers. Activision's accompanying CD-Rom Fun Pack means you can enjoy Rocky and Ginger from the comfort of your desktop.

"Foul Play" is a collection of great clips from the film, the quality of which is fairly good for desktop viewing, though the animation is a little pixilated and can stick in places. But the real beauty of this CD is in the "eggstras"-the "Chickenizer" (a collection of cursors, wallpaper, sounds and icons for your PC); "Egg Savers" (four great screensavers based on the film animation); and the two games--"Spring Chicken", which requires a fairly limited attention span and "Run Chicken Run", a more strategic game of escape where you have to place planks over holes to guide your chickens through various fields to safety. Sounds easy? Just try it ... (you can practice in Fowler's Training Camp before playing the real game!) But beware, the games are curiously addictive, so make sure you set the "clock-a-doodle-doo" desktop alarm to stop those minutes turning into hours.

Chicken Run DVD - available 5 Dec 2000 As warming as a nice cup of tea on a cloudy day, Chicken Run is that charming singularity, a commercially successful British family movie that has near-universal appeal without compromising its inherent British pluckiness (that will be the first and last poultry-pun in this review). It invites us into the Plasticine-world of Tweedy's farm, a far-from-free-range egg factory ruled with an axe of iron by greedy Mrs.Tweedy. One intrepid chicken, Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha) sets her sights on breaking out the whole flock, a cast of beautifully individuated chicken characters including ditsy Babs (voiced by Jane Horrocks), matronly Bunty (Imelda Staunton) and practical-minded Mac (Lynn Ferguson). Each effort is thwarted, and Ginger repeatedly reaps a spell in the coal bunker for her troubles, prompting the first of many allusions to The Great Escape, one of several World War II films name-checked throughout. (Grown-ups will have a ball playing Spot-the-Allusion Game here.) When an American rooster named Rocky (Mel Gibson) literally drops in from the air, the hens are set all a-flutter with excitement thinking he'll help teach them to fly away at last. But Rocky is not all he seems. Although the action sags just a fraction around the 40-minute mark, it's the set pieces that really lift this into the realm of cartoon genius: the montage of inept flying attempts, Rocky and Ginger's narrow escape from Mrs. Tweedy's new pie machine (an horrific contraption of chomping steel and industrial menace) and the magnificent, soaring climax.

Click Here to pre-order the Chicken Run DVD release date 5th Nov 2000

The Chicken Run Desktop Theme is another fun desktop theme from those happy folks at

. The Theme features themed start-up and shutdown screens, choice of 2 different hi-colour (24-bit) desktop wallpaper, cursor set and new desktop icons. Also included are new windows event sounds taken from snippets of the sound track from the film Chicken Run. We have included a full feature screensaver with sound capability (optional) constructed using Screen Saver Studio Deluxe featuring more Chicken Run pics and sounds.. Full installation instructions are provided in a web-page Readme file and the whole theme downloads in a convenient zip file.

If you don't have a copy of Microsoft Plus! help is at hand in the form of Desktop Themes, a shareware desktop theme manager published by Jonathan Potter at Left Side Software. Click on

to get your copy.

The following thumbnails will give you an idea of the screens used in this theme.

You can now use GetRight.Com's downloading Utility GetRight for Java to download this desktop theme. Click on the GetRight Download button that follows to download the Chicken Run Desktop Theme using GetRight for Java instead of your browsers usual download tool. Check out my Download Problems page to find out how to use this facility and for more great tips on how you can improve your downloads using Net Vampire.

If after successfully downloading the theme you think it could be improved or has bugs, then please E-Mail your comments and/or suggestions to me. If you liked this theme please tell future visitors to this web-site -


Buy this poster at allwall.com	Buy this poster at allwall.com