The first Chicken Run movie was a transformative moment for Aardman, as the project to this day was one of the largest stop-motion features in history. Directed by Nick Park and Peter Lord, the 2000 pic expanded the studio while introducing its quirks to a wider audience, going Hollywood in every sense as it parodied The Great Escape, relocating John Sturge’s war film to Yorkshire in the wake of the Second World War. The second, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, seeks to outdo that sense of scale, not to mention that “this time, they’re breaking in,” as director Sam Fell points out.
If the first Chicken Run was a spoof of ’60s-made, ’40s-set suspense war films, the sequel is a thriller in the vein of Mission: Impossible. The scale comes in with the new threat: the wider introduction of large scale factory farming and, as the title suggests, the demand for chicken nuggets.
The first look arrived to great enthusiasm from a crowd after brief showcases of upcoming Netflix Animation films Leo and adult series Blue Eye Samurai. Director Sam Fell, producer Leyla Hobart and Aardman co-founder Peter Lord introduced footage after a nostalgic slideshow of behind-the-scenes photos production stills and release photos, briefly discussing the ideas that Chicken Run hatched from — a visual of a chicken digging under a fence with a spoon.
Dawn of the Nugget finds delightful and characteristically Aardman ways to expand upon its 23-year-old predecessor, through its aforementioned new genre trappings. “We had to go bigger and badder,” Fell says of the factory farm antagonists, describing the movie as “a Bond movie, but with chickens.” Lord noted that the premise, like with the original, worked because it has a “dark and dramatic concept, taken seriously, and then filled with jokes.” Hobert concurred that the comedy is inherent in matching these characters to such a premise, making comparisons of returning protagonist Ginger (voiced by Thandiwe Newton) to Ripley in James Cameron’s blockbuster sequel Aliens, not just for her reluctant heroism but her maternal role in that film.
“We decided to throw a daughter at her — not literally,” Hobert notes, as a way to draw the chickens away from their secluded island utopia. “We want to make a movie for now … as parents we want to build beautiful bubbles for our children,” Fell says of the motivations behind the story, co-written by returning Chicken Run scribe Karey Kirkpatrick, joined by John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard.
Set some time after the first film, Dawn of the Nugget finds Ginger and Rocky (Zachary Levi) now living on an island in “chicken paradise”, having built a hideaway society with their friends. The hatching of their daughter Molly encourages them to stay hidden, before an emerging threat on the mainland — bigger, badder factory farms — pique Molly’s curiosity, and threaten the avian family’s peace.
Their utopia is the setting of the first clip shown at the presentation, a pastoral scene where the chickens have built a village as well as self-sustaining agriculture on the island glimpsed at the conclusion of the first film. The filmmakers jokingly refer to it as “Chicken Wakanda” for its idyllic nature and isolationism, while concept drawings and design sketches show off a village hall, chickens farming giant carrots, using hacksaws to slice cucumbers.
The openness of the village space meant rather daunting scale for a stop-motion production, and so Fell’s team utilized some newer technologies to assist in its design. The Gravity Sketch VR design tool was used to model the village in 3D to figure out said scale, which Fell noted gave them a sort of layout phase that they wouldn’t usually have, typically going straight from storyboards. A second clip showed the village in a little more detail, as well as the trademark British sense of humor going into the film, Ginger’s town hall speech regarding the village’s need to hide intercut with escalating sight gags of panicked chickens wolfing down snacks or accidentally knitting ill omens into scarves in progress.
To contrast the lush fields of the island, the third clip shows a glimpse of the factory farm into which the chickens need to break into to rescue Ginger’s daughter Molly (Bella Ramsay). As promised by the filmmaker’s comparison to James Bond, the scene is hilariously daunting, the farm in fact a large base resembling some amalgamation of the hollow volcano lair of You Only Live Twice through its egg-shaped silos, and the sleek house at its hilltop appearing like the midcentury modernist designs of the Elrod House featured in Diamonds Are Forever (also among the look dev images: London’s brutalist Hayward Gallery).
“We’re not purists,” Fell says as he highlights the film’s combination of traditional techniques and methods of building working in concert with new technologies such as some amount of CG animation and background, as well as the VR tech mentioned earlier in the presentation. He also highlights that the studio always “build where we can,” both for the joy of the craft itself and the tactile pleasure it renders. Lord adds, “We use all kinds of technology but the most important thing is the human touch, the animators as performers,” a sentiment reflected in the many stills shared of the team painting and adjusting the models.
The capers to come seem incredibly promising, such as in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance of a concept drawing of several chickens piloting a human-shaped robot. There’s only half a year left until that promise is fulfilled, with Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget debuting on Netflix globally on December 15.
