Britain’s Aardman Animation is rightly admired for its phenomenal success over the years with stop-motion clay figures. Its breakthrough and still most successful hit is “Chicken Run” – which has now spawned a 23-years-later sequel “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.”
“Nugget” director Sam Fell remembers the hook that drew everyone to “Chicken Run” – “It’s ‘The Great Escape’ – with chickens!”
“That was a massive milestone for the studio. Eventually,” he said in a virtual press conference, “a new single line came about that unlocked a new version of it, a new story. That line was, ‘This time, they’re breaking in.’ With just that one line, it promised a new kind of movie for Aardman. A break-in, a heist, and all of the comic invention that it conjures up with the ingenuity of Aardman characters breaking into a ginormous building and the unlikeliness of chickens as action heroes.
“No Tom Cruise, no Sly Stallone. It’s chickens! It just had this inherently comic notion to it — and a promise for a lot of visual humor. How do these chickens get around this place without being seen?”
The heroic chickens of the original, Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) and Rocky (Zachary Levi), squared off against the evil Miss Tweedy to escape. Now, Ginger’s daughter Molly (Bella Ramsey) has disobeyed mom and been captured by Tweedy’s fearsome chicken processing center. Ginger must lead a ragtag bunch on a life or death mission.
“It’s more than just a simple pastiche of a heist movie,” Fell noted. “At heart, it’s a mother-daughter story about the next chapter of Ginger’s life. And Rocky too. It’s about parenthood. It’s about family, community.
“It’s about the plight of strangers. And it’s about your food fighting back.
“It’s also a big, funny visual delight,” he added. “Just a piece of entertainment in its own right.”
Bringing the characters to animated life took 18 months. “This is bigger and badder than Tweedy’s farm. It’s industrial farming and industrial food production.
“We pushed it to be a Bond’s villain lair and let Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) become a 1960s Bond villain, complete with Mary Quant boots. It was great to bring Ginger’s nemesis back.
“We had to figure out what this place would be that they are breaking into. We would need to create this big factory farm that would be so impossible to get into.
“We really made ourselves laugh and enjoyed the idea of creating all of these ridiculous layers of security that would be built around the invention of the world’s first Nugget! That secret recipe and how highly protected it would be.”
“Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” streams on Netflix Dec. 15