Sam Fell’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget finds Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) and Rocky (Zachary Levi) settled down on a bucolic island sanctuary that’s entirely free of humans, their daring Great Escape-style breakout from Tweedy’s industrial farm now a distant memory. But while they and old friends like Babs (Jane Horrocks) and Fowler (David Bradley) appreciate their hard-won freedom, their young daughter, Molly (Bella Ramsey), is now at an age where this safe haven is beginning to feel like its own form of captivity.
Defying her parents’ wishes and heading out in search of adventure, Molly soon finds herself in trouble on the mainland that the older members of her flock once fought so heroically to leave. And it’s not long before their old foe, Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), re-emerges with a new diabolical scheme—one that allows the basic premise of Peter Lord and Nick Park’s original Chicken Run to be more or less rehashed with notably diminishing returns.
Though it’s been explored many times before in kid-oriented media, the conflict between naïve, youthful curiosity and over-protective authority is one of the genre’s more interesting ones. But this generational dynamic eventually fades into the background of what turns out to be a wholly plot-driven caper. The film zips along in a mostly frictionless way that seems to indicate the fulfilling of an obligation to an established IP, as opposed to the time-consuming labor of love entailed by most other works of claymation, particularly those from Aardman’s beloved creators.
Whether drawing parallels between a poultry slaughterhouse and a P.O.W. camp, or recreating the elaborate physical comedy of silent movies, the studio’s work has always excelled at visual shorthand that allows scenes to be stuffed with intertextual resonance while also exuding the simple pleasures of the medium. That the main cultural reference point here seems to be heist movies like Mission: Impossible, rather than the WWII films alluded to in the first Chicken Run, suggests that inspiration wasn’t always forthcoming for this follow-up. There’s one memorably unsettling idea in the form of a playground-like free range enclosure for chickens that have been lobotomized through some kind of mind-altering device, but any impact this could have had is dulled by the film’s loose, unfocused ambling from one predictable set piece to the next.
It’s hard not to feel like an opportunity was missed with this belated sequel, particularly considering that expectations for big-screen, family-friendly fun have fallen so far in recent years. Following the original film’s release back in 2000, the exponential growth of CGI ushered in an era of slick, increasingly lazy animated anthropomorphism, a process that the runaway success of Chicken Run could well have helped to accelerate. Indeed, the intervening two decades have seen such a glut of this type of film that major animation studios now seem to be running out of physical creatures and objects to personify, with Pixar often turning to abstract concepts in order to create engaging central characters. Additionally, the more recent A.I. insurgency is seen by many as an existential threat for animators, potentially allowing big-money productions to do away with the creative idiosyncrasies of authorial input entirely.
In the face of this digitally enabled desperation and content fatigue, Dawn of the Nugget could have been a refreshing return to first principles for Aardman, but the film mostly fails to make a convincing case for the studio’s old-school artisanal approach. Though Aardman’s painstaking attention to detail is still on display here and there, it’s undersold by bland design, unimaginative framing, and a flat, overly polished look. With none of the satisfying aesthetic appeal or narrative potency of the original, Dawn of the Nugget is happy to plod along as a functional joke vehicle fueled mostly by fond memories of its acclaimed predecessor.
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