![]() ![]() I went on a Poland trip and left feeling as though my emotions had been manipulated in unnecessary, borderline inappropriate ways. By the time I graduated high school, I had become desensitized to images of mass graves filled with dead bodies, and I had become sick of Holocaust literature. Yet, as somebody who went through standard Holocaust education, with grandparents who were Holocaust survivors, I strongly feel that something isn’t working anymore. ![]() I feel very privileged that I received a top-notch Jewish education that included Holocaust studies. But to me, the film is a potential answer to the question that everybody seems to be asking: How should we be teaching children about the Holocaust? ![]() Is “Chicken Run” an allegory for the Holocaust? Sure yeah, why not. You probably read the title of this article and thought a satire account had published it. Suddenly, it’s not just about detaining the chickens to take their valuable eggs - it’s about getting rid of them altogether.ĭo I have to spell this out more or do you see where I’m going? Tweedy buys a chicken pie maker and its oven is what some might call a, uh, last resort. However, in an effort to make money for the farm, Mrs. At the beginning of the film, the chickens are only killed when they are no longer useful and laying eggs. By placing their main human character in black boots, and by continually focusing on that pair of boots, there’s no doubt that the British filmmakers were making a very deliberate choice.īut perhaps most telling of all is Mrs. Heavy black boots specifically have, post-Holocaust, been associated with skinheads and, particularly in Britain, fascists. Separately these images might not be seen as anything, but together they consistently remind us of Holocaust iconography. Tweedy’s heavy black boots and an American rooster aiding in the eventual escape of the chickens. Tweedy sports at the beginning of the movie, the use of aggressive dogs as guard animals, the repeated close-ups of Mrs. There’s the Hitler-esque combover hairdo Mr. Throughout the film there are a handful of smaller, and yet still poignant images that invoke the Holocaust. “Chicken Run” isn’t the first work of art to use different specials to represent Nazis and their Jewish victims - the graphic novel “Maus” by Art Spiegelman famously portrayed Nazis as cats and Jews as mice. The chickens aren’t just an enemy of their captors (as you’d expect in a POW analogy) but rather they are a “subclass” being used to serve the human Tweedys who run the farm. Guard towers stand around the (chicken) wire fence. The chicken coops appear to be modeled after a concentration camp, with rows upon rows of identical wooden houses crammed full of chickens. And hey, maybe I am primed to see the Holocaust wherever I look, but when it comes to “Chicken Run,” I don’t think it’s the biggest stretch. It’s impossible to look past the influences this movie takes from “The Great Escape,” a film released in 1963 about Allied soldiers kept in German prisoner of war (POW) camps: Famous scenes are parodied by the chickens, and even the score music sounds similar. One friend said it was clearly about prisoners of war, and as a Jew, I was just primed to see the Holocaust everywhere I looked. I posted on my Instagram story asking the same question and my followers, too, were divided. “I hope this is for the podcast,” Meryl chimed in, “otherwise I will be a little concerned.”Ĭlaire replied again, this time sending a link to a YouTube video essay that claimed “Chicken Run” was “The Greatest Piece of Communist Art.” “ngl that movie scared the hell out of me as a kid like i couldn’t even watch it and that seems to make sense now a lot more,” added Claire. “Yes? I’m pretty sure it is?” said Becca. Approximately 30 seconds into the film, I texted one of my group chats and asked a very simple, and yet stumping, question: Is “Chicken Run” an allegory for the Holocaust? ![]()
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