‘Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget’ Review: Aardman’s Birds of a Feather Flock Together for a Spirited Sequel

The British production company Aardman, best known for award-winning short films such as the evergreen Creature comfort and short-to-feature franchises such as Wallace & Gromit And Shaun the sheep, specializes in “Claymation”, stop-motion animation created with figurines made of clay and similar materials. Even by the icy standards of animation practice, it takes them ages to produce new work. You could say their output is as rare as hen’s teeth, to quote a Britishism, which is apt because their most successful feature film (and the highest-grossing stop-motion film ever) is still Chicken coop (2000), a family-friendly film set on a 1950s chicken farm, starring a brood of fowl with anatomically incorrect, but very Aardman-esque, overbiting teeth.

But good things come to those who wait, and the studio’s sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, is a worthy successor. We gather the feathered friends who made a break for freedom in the last film, led by chicken Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha in the original, somewhat cruelly discarded here for a supposedly ‘younger-sounding’ Thandiwe Newton) and her American Rooster, Rocky (Zachary Levi, understandably, filling in for Mel Gibson), Gold nugget sees the team breaking into a high-tech factory farm where Ginger and Rocky’s daughter Molly (Bella Ramsey) has run away. Bored with life on the island where the herd fled after the events of Chicken coopand enticed by the inviting photos of chickens living in a garden of pastoral delight that she spies on the side of the truck, Molly teams up with another runaway teenage girl chicken, Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies), to enter the factory. .

Indeed, it turns out to be exactly 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 tough old rooster Fowler (David Bradley) and helpful rats Nick and Fetcher (Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel respectively). Mays). ) – find out what happened, they wanted to break go inside the factory, a reversal of the last film, and save Molly.

And everyone else, of course, even if that last 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 emotionally invest in these particular chickens but doesn’t really challenge the viewers to question the ethics of these chickens. eating poultry in general. It is not, shall we say, vegan friendly.

This time directed by Sam Fell (ParaNorman, Washed away) instead of Chicken coop‘s OG Aardman hands Peter Lord and Nick Park (who serve as executive producers here), this reboot stays true to the retro, handcrafted spirit of the original, literally palpable in the odd visible fingerprint. At the same time, Gold nugget subtly utilizes some of the industry’s technological developments over the last 23 years, such as CGI, which is used here to fill in the thousands of birds required in some shots.

Nevertheless, this remains so close to the Aardman look – with a mid-20secentury world of headscarves, sweater vests and make-do-and-repair spirit with lo-tech mechanical contraptions everywhere – that it is not so much a film that both small children and parents can enjoy, but that it is better suited for small children and grandparents.

This tendency towards older viewers is palpable in the visual references from the 1960s, which mainly refer to the brutalist concrete constructions that Ken Adams designed for Bond films such as Dr. No (1962) and Goldfinger (1964). It is also present in the gag-light script (credited to Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard, based on a story by Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell). For starters, compared to the first Chicken coopthere are far fewer bird-themed puns here and none of the clever, sharp banter you might find in so many other contemporary cartoons.

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

That throwaway joke aside, the lack of cackling-worthy one-liners here and the entertaining but highly predictable final act make this a bit lackluster for savvy viewers. After all, what could be more retro in a cartoon than a conveyor belt full of deadly dangers, a trope that dates back to the Max Fleisher cartoons of the 1930s. Think about that Popeye shorts in which babies wander around construction sites. Aardman has delivered a climax with this kind of tension in all their films, bringing slapstick chaos to the company’s policy of changing the pose of figures every two frames rather than every frame – an approach that makes things a fraction more choppy seems, but at this point some of the handmade charm is part, like the knitting needles that Babs always clicks on in the background. Plus, that slight nastiness is something Aardman fans love, as intrinsically British as the crumbling infrastructure, tasteless tea cakes and political stupidity of voting for Brexit.