Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
Aardman Animations’ latest lark unlikely is a wildly inventive, joyous adventure for adults – and probably their children, too.
Plasticine pastiche: Molly stomps off (with her parents in the background)
In the lexicon of fowl language, no two words can be as offensive as “roast chicken.” Particularly if you are a chicken. With the phenomenal success of Chicken Run, when plasticine never proved so suspenseful, Aardman Animations turned movie pastiche into cinematic gold. The art behind the Aardman brand is how such a sophisticated machine is packaged into something so deceptively simple: Claymation figures representing all the extremes of human emotion. A loving homage to John Sturges’ The Great Escape – and the wartime films that preceded it – Chicken Run had something for everyone: slapstick for the kids, in-jokes for the adults and a chilling message to stoke the virtue of animal activists worldwide. Now that the dramatis personae of the 2000 stop-motion hit have flown the coop, a new franchise is ready to be lampooned: Mission: Impossible, or in the jargon of the jestmeisters here, a caper incredible.
Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) and her husband Rocky (Zachary Levi) have found freedom from the POW-themed egg farm, but they have a new challenge: parenthood. Rocky is so excited that he’s already reading bedtime stories to the laid egg. But when she hatches, the chick, Molly (Bella Ramsey), isn’t walking on eggshells for anybody. Ginger and Rocky and their brood have settled down on an island paradise, Ginger telling her hatchling: “Life, my girl, doesn’t get better than this.” But even as she says this, the sylvan haven across the water is meeting a fate of its own: the imposition of man and his diabolic chainsaw…
Molly has her mother’s sense of adventure. In fact, she’s just like every teenager: curious, rebellious and disobedient. Not far beyond the furthest shore lies a factory styled ‘Fun-Land Farms,’ a high-tech facility built like the concrete lair of a Bond villain. Here, the management has realised that faceless battery farms produce tough, dry and flavourless chicken. So their modus operandi is to create a new breed of happy hens, thus creating tender, juice and tasty – brace yourself – deep-fried nuggets. Inevitably, Molly’s curiosity lands her inside and it’s up to Ginger, Rocky and co. to break into dodge.
Here, the high-tech iris recognition scans on the impenetrable doors are connected to a room where an intern laboriously leafs through a “staff eye pad.” The puns come thick and fast, delivered by the most colourful raft of voice artists this side of Babel, where every regional British accent would seem to be represented (plus Zachary Levi’s token American cock-of-the-roost). It’s hard to single out a single actor, although Zachary Levi puts on a brave voice replacing Mel Gibson’s original Rocky – aka The Lone Free Ranger. Harry Gregson-Williams’s score is another year-best, plucking at snippets of Lalo Schifrin and John Barry, while the visual invention is second to none. It’s also shamelessly British, neither playing down to its audience nor letting a joke slip by because a Tennessee teen won’t get it. Thus, gentle allusions to everybody from Peter Sallis to Cliff Richard get their splay in the sun. Chickwit has never been this joyful.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Voices of Thandiwe Newton, Zachary Levi, Bella Ramsey, Imelda Staunton, Lynn Ferguson, David Bradley, Jane Horrocks, Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, Josie Sedgwick-Davies, Peter Serafinowicz, Nick Mohammed, Miranda Richardson, Julia Sawalha, Tim Bentinck, Sarah Counsell.
Dir Sam Fell, Pro Steve Pegram and Leyla Hobart, Screenplay Karey Kirkpatrick, John O'Farrell and Rachel Tunnard, Ph Charles Copping, Pro Des Darren Dubicki, Ed Stephen Perkins, Music Harry Gregson-Williams.
Aardman Animations/Netflix Animation-Netflix.
97 mins. UK/USA/France. 2023. UK and US Rel: 15 December 2023. Cert. PG.
