Mrs. Tweedy

"They're chickens, you dolt! Apart from you, they're the most stupid creatures on this planet! They don't plot, they don't scheme, and they are NOT ORGANIZED!"

- Mrs. Tweedy yelling at Mr. Tweedy.

Melisha Tweedy, better known as Mrs. Tweedy, is the main antagonist of DreamWorks' 4th full-length animated feature film Chicken Run. She is Mr. Tweedy's wife and boss, and Ginger's arch-nemesis.

She was voiced by Miranda Richardson, who also played Lady Van Tassel in the 1999 live action horror film Sleepy Hollow.

Appearance
Mrs. Tweedy wears a burgundy dress with an upright collar, a black brooch at the throat, black muck boots, red gloves that occasionally go up to her forearms, and sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She has long, dark brunette hair pulled back into a tight bun at the top of her head. She also has blue eyes, as well as periwinkle eyeshadow. She is also taller than her husband.

Personality
"D'oh! Stupid, worthless creatures! I'm sick and tired of making minuscule profits."

- Mrs. Tweedy expressing her hatred for the chickens for the low profits she is having.

Mrs. Tweedy is an extremely selfish, greedy, ruthless, manipulative and hot-tempered woman who only uses the chickens to get money, which she and her husband are very low on. She is always looking for a chance to bully Mr. Tweedy and the chickens, and despite her temper, she is occasionally shown to be quite clever and intellectual - she is the one who comes up with the idea of buying a pie machine to use to make more profit from the chickens.

She is specifically impatient and temperamental with her husband, shown when she is contemplating buying the Pie Machine, and when the Pie Machine is broken. It is also demonstrated that she and her husband have a quarrelsome disagreement on many things — when Mr. Tweedy is attacked by the chickens, he abusively calls to her, "The chickens are revolting!" and she, doing other things at the time, says to herself, "Finally, something we agree on.".

However, she didn't know he didn't meant revolt in the context she was thinking of. She is also shown to be a very tough and resilient woman who is possibly happy with the idea of murdering the chickens, displayed with the evil smile that she gave to the chickens that she selected for slaughter during Roll Call right before they were killed. She is also very abusive, defamatory, argumentative and opprobrious towards the chickens, her husband, and possibly also her dogs, as they are shown to be afraid of her.

Mrs. Tweedy rarely shows any emotion other than disgust or anger. It is fairly safe to say that, based on her behavior, she is also a deranged, obsessive and psychopathic person. Despite her truly diabolical and sinister nature, Mrs. Tweedy was also very careful to craft her public image in a pleasing light, as shown by billboards advertising her pies, which portray her as a smiling and motherly woman rather than the stoic and uptight person she really is. She also has a curious habit of never calling Mr. Tweedy by his first name, even though they share the same last name as they are married.

Powers and Abilities
Despite being a farmswoman with a keen business sense, Mrs. Tweedy carries a hatchet that she uses to behead chickens. She manages to wield it surprisingly well in battle. Additionally, she is a rather cunning and strong woman, being most of the brawn and brains involved at the farm. Mrs. Tweedy is also capable of chasing the chickens down to the point where she was precariously dangling by a thread high above the ground, carrying her axe in her teeth.

Role in the film
In the 1950's, a chicken named Ginger (the heroine of the film) made several failed attempts for her and her fellow chickens to escape from Mrs. Tweedy's farm in Yorkshire, England. As it turns out, Mrs. Tweedy runs the farm like a concentration camp, forcing the chickens to produce eggs to sell for profit and killing those who failed to produce any eggs for a week. As the year goes by, Mrs. Tweedy discovers that profits are constantly going down due to low amounts of eggs being laid. Her husband Mr. Tweedy correctly suspects the chickens are "up to something" due to their attempts to escape, but Mrs. Tweedy brushes this off, believing that they (apart from Mr. Tweedy) are the stupidest creatures on the planet. After seeing an ad for a pie machine, Mrs. Tweedy decides to purchase it to turn all of her chickens into pies in a bid to increase her profits.

After purchasing the machine, Mrs. Tweedy and her husband attempt to kill Ginger in their machine in order to test it, but are thwarted when a visiting American rooster named Rocky rescues her and clogs the gravy sprayer, almost destroying the machine. The chickens begin to prepare their ultimate escape plan: creating an airplane out of their sheds to fly off the farm. In the meantime, Mrs. Tweedy forces Mr. Tweedy to fix the machine. After the repairs are done, Mrs. Tweedy tells Mr. Tweedy to fetch all of the chickens. However, Mr. Tweedy finds out that most of his tools were stolen for the chickens' plan, but he is attacked by the chickens and tied up. He attempts to warn Mrs. Tweedy about this, but she ignores him, unaware of what is going on.

Just as Ginger is about to set up the ramp to help the airplane fly off, Mrs. Tweedy tries to stop her with her axe, finally seeing what's really going on. Fortunately, Rocky (who left until he saw an advertisement for Mrs. Tweedy's Chicken Pies) returns and uses his bike to knock Mrs. Tweedy unconscious, accidentally throwing the axe in the air. Mrs. Tweedy came to and sees the axe land right next to her neck, making her pass out again due to the shock. With that in mind, Rocky and Ginger set the ramp before escaping with the other chickens in their plane.

However, Mrs. Tweedy wakes up and goes off in pursuit of the escaping chickens by grabbing onto the dragging rope. Now insanely mad, she climbs herself up to stop the plane, even if it means endangering her own life. Fortunately, Ginger tricks Mrs. Tweedy into cutting the rope with her axe, and she lands in the safety valve of the pie machine, causing it to explode due to the overwhelming pressure that the gravy has caused, destroying much of the barn. Despite having survived the explosion, Mrs. Tweedy finds herself covered in gravy and stuck inside the same pipe detached from the machine by the explosion.

As the chickens have finally escaped from the farm, Mr. Tweedy (having untied himself and escaped the explosion unscathed) berates his wife for not listening to him about the chickens in the first place. This only enrages Mrs. Tweedy, and she lashes out at her husband for his comment. But finally having had enough, Mr. Tweedy pushes the door down on his wife and flattens her.

Quotes
"Mr. Tweedy? What is that chicken doing outside the fence?"

- Mrs. Tweedy to Mr. Tweedy.

"I may finally have found a way to make some real money around here and what are you on about? Ridiculous notions of escaping chickens!"

- Mrs. Tweedy

"POOR! WORTHLESS! NOTHINGS! But that's all about to change. This will take Tweedy's Farm out of the dark ages and into full scale automated production. Melisha Tweedy will be poor...no longer."

- Mrs. Tweedy revealing her plans.

"It's a pie machine, you idiot. Chicken goes in, pies comes out."

- Mrs. Tweedy to Mr. Tweedy.

"You are going to be a pie!"

- Mrs. Tweedy

"MR. TWEEDY!!!"

- Mrs. Tweedy's last line.

Trivia

 * Both Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy's management on their chicken farm, as well as the farm itself, is somewhat equivalent with the typical prison (or rather super-maximum security prison) for humans in real life than normal real-life chicken farms for the following reason: Fences around Tweedy's family are covered with barbed wire in similar manner with real life prisons. It's said that all chickens must lay eggs properly as well as to never did any attempt to escape or punished via either locked within coal bin or death penalty via butchering.
 * This is somewhat similar with real-life prison where all inmates must obey the rules within the prison or receiving severe punishment. Mr. Tweedy's job, along with his hounds in the movie also comparable with security guards in real-life prison, while Mrs. Tweedy herself on the other hand, is comparable with prison wardens.
 * It should be noted that even if Mrs. Tweedy managed to kill Ginger and get to the chickens and the rats, she would crash the plane and kill both her and the rest of the chickens from falling from great height. She was blinded by her own greed and rage to ever realize her and the chickens' potential downfall.
 * Her real name, Melisha, is likely a play on the word "malicious," another word associated with evil.
 * She is the first DreamWorks Animation antagonist to be a female, being followed by Eris from Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.
 * She is also the first villain in an Aardman Animation movie as Chicken Run was Aardman Animations' first animated movie.