Reflective Encounters

““Hey little hen, when, when, when will you lay me an egg for me tea?” goes the famous nursery rhyme. If the hen is one of the many that appear in Motherclucker, the answer would probably be “When I’m good and f**king ready, now leave me alone you annoying pr**k.”

Emanating from the subconscious of animator Greg McLeod, Motherclucker is a riotous cachophony of noise (thanks to a banging soundtrack), chickens seductively dancing and more fowl behaviour than you can shake an egg at.

There’s little to make sense of on a narrative level here, and once you stop trying to make sense of it all, then you just sit back and enjoy the extremely strange ride into a world of chickens, roosters and hens that looks different from your usual David Attenbourough doc. While there are shades of the likes of surrealist animators David Shrigley and David Firth here, and a style that flits between the childish and the almost disturbingly real, the film eschews dark humour and introspection for a collage of images and sounds that attack the senses in an exhilarating way.”

— Laurence Boyce