Director – Sam Fell, Co-Director – Jeffrey Newitt, Screenplay – Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell & Rachel Tunnard, Story – Karey Kirkpatrick & John O’Farrell, Producers – Leyla Hobart & Steve Pegram, Photography – Charles Copping, Music – Harry Gregson-Williams, Animation Supervisors – Loyd Price & Ian Whitlock, Visual Effects Supervisor – John Biggins, Production Design – Darren Dubicki. Production Company – Aardman.
Voices
Thandiwe Newton (Ginger), Zachary Levi (Rocky), Bella Ramsey (Molly), Josie Sedgwick-Davies (Frizzle), Imelda Staunton (Bunty), Lynn Ferguson (Mac), David Bradley (Fowler), Jane Horrocks (Babs), Romesh Ranganathan (Nick), Daniel Mays (Fetcher), Nick Mohammed (Dr Fry), Miranda Richardson (Melisha Tweedy), Peter Serafinowicz (Reginald Smith)
Plot
Having escaped from Mrs Tweedy’s chicken farm, the chickens have built their own paradise on a small island. Ginger and Rocky have a daughter Molly who soon grows up. They keep her unaware of the fate that chickens meet at human hands but Molly becomes curious about the mainland. In particular, she becomes excited when she sees a bunch of vehicles passing for the newly established Fun Land Farms that have pictures of chickens in buckets on the side. Ginger holds a meeting and announces a plan to place up camouflage netting to hide their presence on the island. They then discover that Molly has crossed over to the mainland. Molly joins a stray chicken Frizzle as they follow a Fun Land van. Ginger, Rocky and the other chickens race in pursuit to stop her only for Molly and Frizzle to be snatched up by the van driver and thrown in with the other chickens. Inside the Fun Land factory, Molly finds an amazing playland but then realises that all the other chickens are stupefied zombies as a result of the mind control collars placed on them. As Ginger hatches an elaborate plan to break in to the factory to rescue her, Molly makes the discovery of the real reason the chickens are there are to be killed and eaten. She learns of Dr Fry’s belief that making chickens happily go to their deaths with the use of the collar improves their flavour. Behind Fry’s scheme, Ginger discovers her old nemesis of Mrs Tweedy.
UK’s Aardman Animation is a company that specialises in Claymation (animation using clay and plasticine models). They gained acclaim first with the Peter Gabriel music video Sledgehammer (1986) and then the Wallace and Gromit shorts, which gained them a cult following. Chicken Run (2000) was their first feature film and enjoyed reasonable success. They followed this with Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). They dallied with standard computer animation in Flushed Away (2006) and Arthur Christmas (2011), as well as The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012), which combined both Claymation and computer animation, before making a return to Claymation with Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015), Early Man (2018) and Farmageddon (2019).
I had mixed feelings about a Chicken Run sequel. Firstly, it has been 23 years since the original came out – has the original been imprinted in the public consciousness so much that people will come flocking back for a second adventure? Also Aardman, while being seen as a major studio in the 2010s/early 2010s, has seemed a little underwhelming in their output since Shaun the Sheep Movie. Their most recent efforts, Early Man and Farmageddon, have felt fairly lightweight and forgettable.
There is also the choice of director in Sam Fell, who made one of Aardman’s most forgettable films Flushed Away, although did go on to the likeable animated The Tale of Despereaux (2008) and the stop-motion animated ParaNorman (2012) for Laika. Certainly, original scriptwriter Karey Kirkpatrick is back, now one of three credited writers. The other disappointment is that only a handful of the voice cast from the original return. There are return performances from Miranda Richardson as Mrs Tweedy and Jane Horrocks, Imelda Staunton and Lynn Ferguson as supporting hens. However, the distinctive chirpy voice of Julia Sawalha as Ginger has been replaced by Thandiwe Newton who tries hard but is not quite the same, while Zachary Levi makes a colourless replacement for Mel Gibson as Rocky.
The chickens plan a break-in to Fun-Land Farms
The original Chicken Run was a parody of a WWII POW escape movie conducted with talking chickens. By contrast, Dawn of the Nugget is more a parody of a film like The Guns of Navarone (1961) or Where Eagles Dare (1968) about the hatching of a plot to assail an impregnable fortress. Here the chicken farm of the original has been reconceived as a full-on super-villain’s lair with electrified fence, drawbridge, pop-up robotic sentinels and a moat that is prowled by robotic ducks with laser-guided sights.
It is also noticeable that the two principal characters from the original, Ginger and Rocky, have now undergone a generational shift. Where they started out as the leaders of a revolution, they are now settled down parents. It is just like Disney sequels of the early 2000s such as The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride (1998), The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea (2000), Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure (2001) where the characters from the originals became parents whose adventuring had been replaced by concerned parenting helicoptering over the children who were starting to exhibit the very same tendencies they originally did.
It took me some time to get into Dawn of the Nugget. For a long time, it seemed to be coasting by on repeating the same familiarity that audiences had with the original. What was missing from the script was some of the punning jokes of the original. The film started to find its feet around about a third of the way in about the point that Rocky tries to break into the farm, which becomes a series of slapstick mishaps as he slingshots himself across the electric fence and pole vaults across the moat, while avoiding being singed by robotic sensors.
Thereafter, Sam Fell finds the same nutty appeal of the original Wallace and Gromit shorts, filled with eccentric Rude Goldberg contraptions and schemes. The film’s most appealing moments come in the scheme that Ginger contrives to break into the farm, which involves fooling a guard with a birthday cake attached to a rocket sled; a break-in with a propeller-driven artificial cloud; traversing the moat in diving gear made up out of fishbowls, hot water bottles and recycled detergent containers; the use of a polaroid of a guard’s eye extended on a measuring tape to fool the retinal scanner. From there on, Dawn of the Nugget finds its feet and becomes an appealingly snappy and wilfully silly caper in the Aardman style. The height of this is the delirious absurdity of the chickens trapped in a grain silo and using a rocket, along with a pair of spectacle lenses to light its fuse, in order to cook the corn and turn it into popcorn so it can propel them up to the top of the silo.
