Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget review – sequel soars above the original
The Aardman animation sequel combines quirky British humour with emotional depth to create a faster, zanier caper with more ambitious action set pieces, more white-knuckle jeopardy, and more robotic ducks.
(BBC) It’s been 23 years since Chicken Run, Aardman’s first full-length feature film, introduced the world at large to the Bristolians’ claymation figures and batty British humour – and it’s still the studio’s biggest box-office hit. That statistic might explain why Aardman has now made a Chicken Run sequel, but it could also explain why they waited so long. Faced with the challenge of living up to such a beloved global smash, you can hardly blame them for chickening out. Luckily, the risk they’ve finally taken has paid off. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget doesn’t just reach the standards of its high-flying predecessor, but it soars above them.
Written by Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell, and Rachel Tunnard, the story begins immediately after the end of the original Chicken Run – an illusion that is a lot easier to pull off when you’re animating clay models than it is when you’re shooting flesh-and-blood actors. Ginger the hen and Rocky the rooster have escaped from the Tweedys’ farm, and now live with the rest of their feathered friends on an idyllic island, in the kind of rustic village that could easily be inhabited by hobbits or Ewoks.
Ginger and Rocky then have a chick, Molly (voiced by Bella Ramsey), who soon grows into a teenager – or whatever the equivalent of a teenager is in poultry years. She might lead a carefree, free-range life, but she has inherited her dad’s wanderlust and her mum’s rebellious defiance, so she is annoyed that they won’t let her leave the island. To their horror, Ginger and Rocky realise that Molly sees them as jailers, just as they saw Mr and Mrs Tweedy as jailers – so even in its opening minutes, the sequel has more emotional depth than the whole of the first Chicken Run.
When Molly spots a lorry with “Fun-Land Farms” painted enticingly on the side, she runs away from home, and discovers too late that a place that was advertised as a paradise is actually a monstrous space-age fortress with a marked resemblance to a Bond villain’s base. Inside, the captive hens are fitted with will-sapping electronic collars that turn them into compliant zombies, as mindlessly content to walk to their doom as the women in The Stepford Wives.
Ginger and Rocky plan a rescue mission, and Ginger utters a line that was presumably intended as much for the trailer as for the film: “Last time we broke out of a chicken farm. This time we’re breaking in.”
The only off-putting thing about this is that last time, Ginger and Rocky were voiced by Julia Sawalha and Mel Gibson, whereas this time, Thandiwe Newton and Zachary Levi have taken over the roles.