Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget Review: A Fun, Flighty Return To Aardman's Original Feature
Somehow, it has been almost 25 years since Aardman Animations released its first full-length stop-motion animated film, "Chicken Run." The then-fledgling DreamWorks SKG released the film in the summer of 2000, before the studio's fortunes would shift with the "Shrek" franchise the following year. For Aardman, though they netted an A-List celebrity in the form of Mel Gibson (ah, a simpler time before we knew all about his personal life), "Chicken Run" was both thrilling and also somewhat modest. Riffing on World War II-era entertainment, "Chicken Run" was an exciting adventure about a group of chickens who band together to escape their cruel owners and a fine example of how animation could do more than just what was being offered by Disney and Pixar. Now, decades later, Aardman isn't the only stop-motion animation house working today, and DreamWorks' biggest days appear to be behind them. So for a sequel, subtitled "Dawn of the Nugget," Aardman is now pairing with Netflix for another lighthearted, fast-paced adventure that is both enjoyable and can't help but feel slightly like reheated leftovers.
Many of the same characters from "Chicken Run" appear in "Dawn of the Nugget," though there are some notable casting changes. The formerly rambunctious Rocky is no longer voiced by Gibson; instead, Zachary Levi takes over. Thandiwe Newton replaces Julia Sawalha as Ginger, Rocky's wife and the true ringleader of the first film's escape plan. When "Dawn of the Nugget" begins, Rocky and Ginger are living a good life with the other escaped chickens, and are eagerly awaiting the arrival of their first child, who they name Molly. Once Molly has grown to the equivalent of a human teenager (and is now voiced by Bella Ramsey of "The Last of Us"), she wants badly to make an escape of her own and see the rest of the world. Based on their harrowing experiences in evading Mrs. Tweedy and her dumb husband, Ginger and Rocky are wary of letting Molly spread her wings literally and metaphorically. But when Molly sneaks away and is then captured by a socially inept scientist (Nick Mohammed), the chickens now have to break in, instead of out.
The sense of familiarity extends beyond the setup, as it turns out that the mastermind of the large, technologically snazzy interior chicken farm in which Molly finds herself isn't that scientist, but none other than Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson). Writers Karey Kirkpatrick, John O'Farrell, and Rachel Tunnard (as well as director Sam Fell) make it fairly obvious that Tweedy will be back, though the script also tries to treat her arrival as a shocking twist when it instead feels fairly inevitable if not logical. The charms of "Dawn of the Nugget" are not in the script, per se; it's slightly less clever this time around, as much of the film's setup just feels like a reverse of what came before without a great deal of innate creativity. The charm comes from what Aardman does best: crafting manically fast-paced action sequences and showcasing the handmade qualities of stop-motion animation.
A charming mid-century riff
Unlike its predecessor, "Dawn of the Nugget" takes place removed from World War II, a few years later on. This enables Fell and the animators to do some charming visual riffs on mid-century style (akin to the set design in Pixar's "Incredibles" sequel from 2018), especially once Tweedy's true plan comes into focus. There's some shared timeliness, too, in the new chicken-farming scheme Molly inadvertently discovers. Though the end result is the same as ever before, the chickens become vastly more docile to the point of being brainwashed and are located in an amazingly bright and colorful false world, accidentally recalling the first act of this summer's smash hit "Barbie," with its pastel colors and characters who are comfortable with a status quo scenario.
The vocal shifts are largely unnoticeable, though fans may be disappointed that Sawalha was recast (with Gibson, you can imagine that his personal problems led to a change, but it's not the case with his female co-star). Animation fans may laugh at another inadvertent parallel, as "Dawn of the Nugget" opens in weirdly similar fashion to "Tangled," wherein a character voiced by Zachary Levi starts self-consciously telling us a story that isn't about his character. Levi and Newton acquit themselves well, but arguably the best of the new performers is Mohammed as the helplessly nerdy Dr. Fry, who doesn't realize exactly who or what Mrs. Tweedy really is but has plenty of enthusiasm to spare for the chicken farm he's designed.
But as always, the charms of Aardman's stop-motion animation are not about timeliness, as much as they are about offering a distinctly different style of animation from the commonplace computer animation style evinced by Pixar and Disney. Back in 2000, Aardman felt like a breath of fresh air because "Chicken Run" avoided big, Broadway-style songs and even the classic buddy-comedy style of storytelling in films like "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life." Now, there's a wealth of animation options for audiences, from films like "Wish" and "Elemental" to last week's Studio Ghibli film "The Boy and the Heron" and this past summer's "Across the Spider-Verse." Aardman still stands alone in this respect; even though "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget" is not their finest work, it serves as an important reminder to audiences and studios alike that the painstaking style of stop-motion animation may take a while to bear feature-length fruit, but the results are solidly entertaining nonetheless.
/Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10