Twenty-three years ago, the Bristol-based film company Aardman Animations had a smash hit with their first feature film Chicken Run, the quirky, tender, funny story of a Great Escape-style prison break from a chicken factory. It remains the Wallace and Gromit studio’s biggest box office film to date and the highest grossing stop motion film in history.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that its long-awaited sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, lacks the spark of the original – fewer unstoppable belly laughs, more genial chuckling. Written by Karey Kirkpatrick, Rachel Tunnard and British journalist and Spitting Image writer John O’Farrell, it’s perfectly decent festive entertainment. But where the original is still endlessly quotable two decades later – “My whole life flashed before my eyes… it were really boring”; “Put your head between your knees and kiss your bum goodbye”; “THRRRUST” – it’s hard to imagine jokes like “there go the goujons” being quoted much beyond this Christmas.
The animation, a combination of stop motion and CGI, has a more garish look more resonant of AI-rendered images than carefully moulded clay. A box of McNuggets instead of homemade chicken tenders, if you will. (Although Dawn of the Nugget’s stridently anti-fast food stance would certainly object to the former. You won’t be ordering any breaded poultry for a while afterwards.)
Ginger, who escaped Tweedy’s Farm in the last film, now lives on an idyllic island far from the potential human risks of the mainland. She and her American rooster mate Rocky (now voiced by Thandiwe Newton and Zachary Levi respectively, instead of he first film’s Julia Sawalha and Mel Gibson) have a daughter Molly (The Last of Us’s Bella Ramsey), who has inherited her mother’s adventurous spirit. She makes friends with a cheeky Scouse rebel called Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies) and ends up breaking into Tweedy’s Farm instead of out, where she discovers a dystopian utopia of brainwashed chickens, clucking mindlessly in a bubblegum-palette pleasureland before merrily skipping to their deaths as part of the evil Mrs Tweedy’s (Miranda Richardson) plan for chicken nugget world domination.
The stakes are both enjoyably high and simultaneously very silly, and it keeps the film in that same sweet spot that made the first one so watchable for children and adults alike. It’s often gently charming, with a lot of inverted espionage jokes. I particularly enjoyed a moment where the group uses the magic of sunlight and glass refraction to make popcorn and (yes, really) save themselves from imminent death by grinder.
There is a sense, though, with its predictable plot, that this is a bit of a film-by-committee. This is no Toy Story 2 sequel masterpiece.
Still, it’s a lively voice cast, particularly Ramsey, whose pluck and idealism always keep it fun, and there’s still an unmistakably British feel about the whole thing that feels humble and self-deprecating and affectionate.
The gang might have to use dodgy homemade cannonballs that leave them half-stranded on their rescue mission, but in the end, they get the job done.