Movie Review: “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget”

By Leslie Felper

The British production company Aardman, best known for award-winning shorts such as the evergreen Creature Comforts and short-to-feature franchises like Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, specializes in “Claymation,” stop-motion animation done using figurines made of clay and similar material. Even by the glacial standards of animation practice, they take ages to produce new work. You might say their output is rare as hens’ teeth, to quote a Britishism, which is apt because their most successful feature (and the highest-grossing stop-motion film ever) is still Chicken Run (2000), a family-friendly film set on a 1950s chicken farm that stars a brood of fowl with anatomically incorrect, but very Aardman-esque, over-bitey teeth.

But good things come to those who wait, and the studio’s sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, is a worthy successor. Rounding up the feathered friends who made a break for freedom in the last film, led by hen Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha in the original, somewhat cruelly discarded here for a supposedly “younger-sounding” Thandiwe Newton) and her American rooster beau Rocky (Zachary Levi subbing in, more understandably, for Mel Gibson), Nugget sees the team breaking into a high-tech factory farm to which Ginger and Rocky’s daughter Molly (Bella Ramsey) has run away. Bored with life on the island to which the flock fled after the events of Chicken Run, and seduced by the inviting pictures of chickens living in a garden of pastoral delight that she spies on the side of the truck, Molly teams up with another runaway teen-girl chicken, Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies), to get into the factory.

It indeed turns out to be just the pastel-colored paradise they imagined, but there’s a deadly catch. Once Ginger, Rocky and their friends — matriarchs Bunty (Imelda Staunton), Mac (Lynn Ferguson) and Babs (Jane Horrocks), plus blowhard old cockerel Fowler (David Bradley) and helpful rats Nick and Fetcher (Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel Mays, respectively) — work out what’s happened, they set out to break into the factory, a reversal of the last film, and save Molly.

And everyone else, of course, although that latter decision turns out to be a side benefit rather than the main goal. Like city folk who move to the countryside and raise chickens as pets and for eggs but would never dream of eating the birds themselves, the film wants us to get emotionally invested in these specific chickens but doesn’t truly challenge viewers to question the ethics of eating poultry in general. It’s not, shall we say, vegan-friendly.

Directed this time by Sam Fell (ParaNorman, Flushed Away) instead of Chicken Run’s OG Aardman hands Peter Lord and Nick Park (who serve as executive producers here), this reboot stays true to the original’s retro, handmade spirit, literally palpable in the odd visible thumbprint. At the same time, Nugget subtly takes advantage of some of the industry’s technological advances in the past 23 years, such as CGI, used here to fill out the thousand-bird flock needed in some shots.

Nevertheless, this sticks so closely to the Aardman look — offering a mid-20^th-century world of headscarves, sweater vests and make-do-and-mend spirit with lo-tech mechanical contraptions everywhere — that it’s not so much a film that little kids and parents alike might enjoy as it is one better suited to little kids and grandparents.

That skew toward older viewers is felt in the 1960s visual references, which allude especially to the Brutalist concrete structures that Ken Adams designed for Bond films like Dr. No (1962) and Goldfinger (1964). It’s also there in the gag-light script (credited to Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard, working from a story by Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell). For starters, compared to the first Chicken Run, there are far fewer avian-themed puns here and none of the smart-ass edgy backchat you might find in so many other contemporary cartoons.

Instead, the humor is mostly situational, playing off the disconnect between the chickens’ innocent view of the world and the viewer’s more experienced insight. Hence, perhaps the funniest line comes when Frizzle and Molly gush about how excited they are at the promised prospect of getting their own buckets, as Frizzle asks rhetorically, “What chicken doesn’t want a bucket?”

Aside from that throwaway gag, the lack of cackle-worthy one-liners here and the entertaining but highly predictable last act make this a little bit snoozy for savvier viewers. After all, what could be more retro in a cartoon than a conveyor belt full of deadly dangers, a trope that goes back to the Max Fleisher cartoons of the 1930s. Think of those Popeye shorts where babies wander into construction sites. Aardman has put a climax with this sort of suspense in every one of their films, making for slapstick mayhem as signature as the company’s policy of changing figures’ pose every 2 frames instead of every frame — an approach that makes things look fractionally jerkier but is by this point part of the hand-crafted charm, like the knitting needles Babs is always clicking away at in the background. Plus, that slight scruffiness is something Aardman fans love, as intrinsically British as crumbling infrastructure, flavorless tea biscuits and the political stupidity of voting for Brexit.