Grade: B-

Verdict: May be just your dish if you're in the mood for an offbeat oddity.

Details: Directed by Nick Park and Peter Lord ("Wallace & Gromit"). Rated G. 1 hour, 22 minutes.

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Review: Hope, Emily Dickinson once said, is the thing with feathers. But hope is in short supply for the fine feathered stars of "Chicken Run," a new stop-motion animation feature done by British animators Nick Park and Peter Lord in the painstaking style known as stop motion.

You probably don't know Park and Lord by name, but you may know their work: "Wallace & Gromit," an award-winning series of shorts based on the adventures of a daft inventor and his resourceful dog, or "Creature Comforts," a truly marvelous, Oscar-winning short featuring interviews with some claymated zoo residents.

However, whether a feature-length animation, pithily described by one mogul as " 'The Great Escape' but with chickens," will fly is a matter of speculation.

Set on an ominous-looking chicken farm sometime in the 1950s, the movie begins with some rather clever homages to the Steve McQueen classic, as well as a tip of the hat to Billy Wilder's "Stalag 17" (the hut where the hens gather to plot their escapes is No. 17). See, these biddies have to produce a certain number of eggs per week or else they end up as dinner. No wonder plucky Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha of "Absolutely Fabulous'') wants out - and often ends up, à la McQueen, in solitary confinement. (There's a great joke in which we hear her tossing a baseball, as McQueen did, to pass the time.)

Things go from bad to worse when the farm's resident villainess, Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), decides there's more money in chickens than eggs. She installs a frightening, Rube Goldberg-like contraption that converts chickens into chicken pies. Enter an unlikely rescuer: a rooster named Rocky (voiced by Mel Gibson), who claims he can teach the hens to fly to freedom.

There's no question that animation cultists will flock (sorry) to "Chicken Run." Otherwise, it's hard to peg the film's intended audience. Certainly not kids, who won't get the movie in-jokes or the deadpan British-housewife humor. And probably not mainstream moviegoers, who may find the film visually inventive but narratively slight.

Still, you never know what will catch the public's fancy ("Survivor," anyone?). I was ready to fly the coop long before the 82 minutes were up, but if you're in the mood for something offbeat and wacky, "Chicken Run" may be just your kind of amiably birdbrained entertainment.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service