This taste of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget was first published in conjunction with the film's world premiere at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival. It has been updated for the film's Netflix release.
The original 2000 Chicken coop is a delightful Aardman Animation stop-motion romp about a gang of chickens who escape from a prison-like poultry farm. The structure and imagery are taken directly from classic POW escape films, especially from 1963 The great escapeThat's why the cheerful plasticine characters inhabit such a grimy, lived-in world of barbed wire, wood and copper, of structures cobbled together from old agricultural implements.
Netflix's long-in-the-making sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, is a similar film – a funny, mostly British romp for all ages – but it looks strikingly different. His inspirations are still mid-20th century films, but longtime stop-motion director Sam Fell (ParaNorman, Washed away) has shifted the focus from war stories to 1960s spy movie futurism. This sequel is set in a bright world full of gadgets, lasers, sculpted metal, mechanized steel doors and mind-control plots.
A primary source of inspiration here is the James Bond films, but Dawn of the Nugget takes out even more elements Mission Impossible – both the original TV series from the 1960s and 1970s, and the later film incarnation that has become Tom Cruise's life's work. According to Fell and the production team, who attended the film's world premiere at the London Film Festival, the idea for a sequel to Aardman's best-loved film began with a single sentence that lives on as the tagline: “This time, they're breaking in!” The focus of the film is so simple: an escape movie turned heist movie, with the chickens infiltrating a high-tech farm that isn't quite what it seems.
The setup is that practical Ginger and reckless Rocky – now played by Westworld star Thandiwe Newton and Zachary Levi, who replace the original's Julia Sawalha and Mel Gibson, have settled with the rest of the freed chickens on a secret island, hidden from human eyes. They lead an idyllic life there, but the couple's daughter, Molly (The last of us co-star Bella Ramsey), has a naturally adventurous spirit that bucks Ginger's overprotective bubble. One day, Molly spies trucks on the mainland advertising what appears to be a utopian chicken paradise called Fun-Land Farms, and runs off to investigate.
Fun-Land Farms is, as it turns out, the new venture of the original film's villain, Mrs. Tweedy (still Miranda Richardson): it's an elaborate fortress guarded by robot moles and rocket-firing ducks, and run by Tweedy's new crazy …scientist husband, Dr. Fry (Ted Lasso'Nick Mohammed). The secret sauce in Tweedy and Fry's chicken recipe is a mind control collar, combined with a Truman Show-style idealized artificial environment that means the chickens go from the factory to slaughter feeling happy and relaxed – and apparently much tastier that way. When Molly becomes entangled in this devious system, Ginger, Rocky and some of their old friends set out to free her.
Image: Netflix
Some of the jokes this setup suggests are more obvious than others. Dawn of the Nugget has a gloriously silly non sequitur about one of those eye-scanning door locks that no supervillain fortress is complete without, but also a fair number of set pieces we've seen before, as the chickens sneak through vents or disguise themselves as bushes. As usual with Aardman projects, the film is beautifully polished, but also slow to find its rhythm, and as a sequel released 23 years after the original, it sometimes feels more like an obligation than a film the studio really needed or wanted . to make. The first half flows smoothly, but once the action moves fully into the surreal world of Fun-Land Farms, the energy increases and the ideas start to flow.
That's partly thanks to the filmmakers' obvious love of stylized '60s spy classics, referencing both deep and wide cuts. There's a sharp, satirical, almost paranoid edge to the mind-control conceit – a suggestion that a comforting, happy life as a good citizen will only drag you to the meat grinder – reminiscent of an obscure, unforgettably strange British cousin of Mission Impossible and James Bond: The prisoner. This cult TV show from the 1960s stars an extremely angry Patrick McGoohan (also the show's creator) as a secret agent named Number Six, who is trapped in the idyllic folly of a seaside village where everyone is friendly, but escape is impossible.
Something about the unreal paradise in which the chickens are locked up Dawn of the Nugget and the schoolmasterly but sinister attitude of their captors (as well as the restaurant buyer in a bowler hat who wants to buy their gold nuggets) reminded me of The prisoner's suffocating dystopia of cream tea, bureaucracy and a strange white blob that chased would-be refugees. I could just imagine Ginger turning furiously to the camera and uttering Number Six's famous cry, “I'm not a number!” I am a free chicken!”
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget now streaming on Netflix.