It's been nearly a quarter of a century since Aardman invented its first feature film, and the generation that opted for "Chicken Run," excited by the novelty of watching a pseudo-serious genre film made silly by an ensemble of poultry in stop-motion, has grown. until they are parents. Distributed by DreamWorks, the 2000 cartoon reimagined “The Great Escape” with chickens, as a doomed flock plots to fly into the chicken coop of a World War II-style concentration camp run by the intimidating Mrs. Tweedy.
In the tasty (if juvenile) Netflix-commissioned sequel, “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” it's the other way around... or, as the passionate Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) says in her trailer-ready motivational speech. “Last time we escaped from a chicken farm. Well, this time we're going in! While the tongue-in-cheek original was a parody of war movies, “Nugget” serves as a riff on “Mission: Impossible”-style action movies, putting Ginger in charge of an operation to infiltrate a factory chicken farm. after his only son. Molly (Bella Ramsey) is locked up there.
Director: Sam Fell
Writers: Karey Kirkpatrick, John O'Farrell, Rachel Tunnard
Stars: Thandiwe Newton, Zachary Levi, Bella Ramsey
From a distance, the facility looks more like a Bond villain's heavily fortified base than any food processing plant you've ever seen. However, for the chickens imprisoned inside, Fun Land Farms has been designed to fulfill their idea of paradise, even if it is a spooky "Squid Game" style, where the brightly colored settings and sky blue walls give a appearance of comfort before the feathered guests are sent to the meat grinder. It seems like a pretty humane alternative to most chicken farms, even if it's a far cry from the cage-free freedom its siblings enjoy from the start, as seen in a cute montage set to a catchy song, “My Sweet Baby” by Paloma Faith.
Raised in relative safety on an island far from humanity, Molly, the "big, brave girl," has reached an age where she wants to explore the world at large, a world where humans have decided that chickens are delicious. It's interesting that Aardman managed to make two films in which the audience empathizes with the chickens without doing anything to diminish his appetite for the creatures. “Nugget” isn't so much a call to veganism as a whimsical case of showing kids where their fried goodness really comes from, since it's easy to forget when they're eating food that doesn't resemble a once-living animal.
The “Chicken Run” sequel brought “Flushed Away” director Sam Fell back to the Aardman fold after co-directing “ParaNorman” for Laika. While computer-generated cartoons are like chicken eggs, and are best enjoyed before a certain date, Aardman's approach, which involves painstakingly adjusting clay figures and photographing them a dozen times for every second of screen time , has a timeless quality that still seems fresh decades later. Fell wanted to make “Flushed Away” in stop-motion, but the scope was too ambitious at the time. With “Nugget,” he is free to dream big, and the digital tricks used to expand sets or orchestrate complex crowd scenes are near-perfect.
Among the qualities that distinguish Aardman's sensibility is a kind of unabashed absurdity, amplified by the British accent and the narrow-minded, provincial naiveté of his bird-brain set. Since the days when Nick Park made Wallace and Gromit shorts, the creative team has loved complicated gadgets and elaborate tricks of the kind you might see in a live-action production. Fell prefers simpler compositions and traditional camera angles, but occasionally becomes eccentric, as when Mrs. Tweedy makes her dramatic entrance descending a spiral staircase.
Nugget” reunites most of the original characters, although not necessarily the same cast. Ginger is braver than ever with Newton in the recording booth, and Rocky is appropriately cocky now that “Chuck” star Zachary Levi is doing the honors. Here the role of the rooster is greatly reduced to make room for the heroic hens. Imelda Staunton and Jane Horrocks return as Bunty and Babs, while David Bradley makes an excellent replacement for Fowler, the cantankerous old war veteran. When Molly goes off on her own, she meets a feisty single woman named Frizzle, who is a brave addition to this group of pear-shaped critters.
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