Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget Was Influenced By Thunderbirds And Mission: Impossible [Exclusive]
More than two decades ago, "Chicken Run" clucked its way onto the movie scene and became a runaway hit. The stop-motion animation movie was clever and strange, and unlike any of its contemporaries at the time (CGI-heavy flick "Dinosaur" and wacky Disney one-off "The Emperor's New Groove" bookended it at the year's box office). "Chicken Run" was also a surprisingly rich text, a movie that included plenty of moments of parody and humor meant to appeal to adults as well as kids.
The first movie functioned as a riff on "The Great Escape," the 1963 war film starring Steve McQueen, but the new sequel film, "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget," chose a different parody path. In an interview with /Film, director Sam Fell confirmed that "Dawn of the Nugget" was influenced by heist films, so much so that it earned a pointed nickname during production. "We called it 'Chicken Impossible,' actually, because of [Mission: Impossible]," Fell told /Film. "I'm such a fan of those movies and they're just brilliantly made, all of them."
It's heist time
Fell noted that in addition to the obvious parallels between the two films ("Dawn of the Nugget" features a complex plan to get a captured chicken back from a factory farm), "Mission: Impossible" also captures the cinematic experience the animated movie is going for. "I do love that sort of big Saturday night action movie experience," he said. "There's just something really cozy about it, especially if you're with your mates or your family, you're with people watching something like that."
The team behind the film, which was written by John O'Farrell, Rachel Tunnard, and returning writer Karey Kirkpatrick, didn't stop with the Tom Cruise action classic. "We looked at every single possible heist movie," Fell said, citing Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's" films, "Baby Driver," and "mad little" indie films like Alan Taylor's 1995 flick "Palookaville." Fell says the heist movie plot was a match made in heaven for Aardman Animations Limited, the studio behind the film's claymation-style visuals. "It was a new kind of genre for Aardman," he explained, but "all that sort of ingenuity that goes on and the clever tricks and the gizmos. And that just lends itself to Aardman already."
The movie also goes full Bond villain plot
If "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget" is one part heist movie, Fell said it's also one part "Thunderbirds." "We never went super high-fi, sci-fi," he explained. "We looked at Gerry Anderson as well, like the 'Thunderbirds' movies, for our special effects. All of our special effects were sort of influenced by those old-fashioned puppet live-action effects." The 1960s British series "Thunderbirds," which was co-created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, famously used detailed puppets to bring its futuristic story to life.
Though the "Chicken Run" series isn't made with puppets, it borrows from the slightly wonky visual effects of "Thunderbirds" in key ways. For example, Fell said that when the film shows water, the team "made sure the water looked like it had been shot in a bath rather than being a proper big fancy CGI lake," a choice that he said made the splashes we see on screen not quite to scale.
There's one last movie "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget" apparently riffed on, but it's a spoiler as well: at the film's end, Fell points out, the movie veers into James Bond movie territory with a villainous plot that could destroy all chickenkind. "It's sort of Bond really in the end because the 'Dawn of the Nugget,' this notion of the nuggets being this kind of apocalyptic event that would be meted on chicken kind," he told /Film. "It just seemed very Bond scale, like 'Moonraker' and the crazy madness of a Bond villain's idea." Put all of the movies that influenced the new animated sequel together, and you'd have one hell of an eclectic watchlist. First, though, you can watch "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget" for yourself: it's now on Netflix.