Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is really a Mission: Impossible movie

The following is a preview. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget comes from the film’s world premiere at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival.

Original Version 2000 Chicken RunIt’s a stop-motion Aardman Animation romp that features a group of chickens breaking free from a farm. It takes its structure and imagery directly from classic prisoner-of-war escape movies, particularly 1963’s The Great EscapeIt is because its plasticine characters live in a world that’s cluttered with barbed wire and wood. They also use old farm tools to make contraptions.

Netflix’s long-in-the-making sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, is a similar movie — a jocular, all-ages, specifically British romp — but it looks strikingly different. The mid-20th century movies that inspired the film are still present, but stop-motion filmmaker Sam Fell’s (ParaNorman, Flushed away() has shifted the focus away from war stories and towards 1960s spy movies. This sequel takes places in a world filled with gadgets, mind-control plots, mechanized doors, sculpted metallic, and lasers.

The James Bond films are the primary source of inspiration, but Dawn of the NuggetTakes even more elements of Mission: Impossible — both the origYou can also find out more about the following:al 1960s-1970s TV series, and the later movie incarnation that has become Tom Cruise’s life’s work. According to Fell and the production team, who attended the movie’s world premiere at the London Film Festival, the idea for a sequel to Aardman’s best-loved film started with a single phrase that lives on as its tagline: “This time, they’re breaking in!” The movie’s focus pretty much is that simple: An escape movie has become a heist movie, with the chickens infiltrating a high-tech farm facility that isn’t quite what it seems.

The setup is that practical Ginger and reckless Rocky — now played by Westworld star Thandiwe Newton and Zachary Levi, replacing the original’s Julia Sawalha and Mel Gibson — have settled down with the rest of the liberated chickens on a secret island, hidden from human eyes. They live an idyllic existence there, but the couple’s daughter, Molly (The Last of Us co-star Bella Ramsey), has a natural spirit of adventure that strains against Ginger’s overprotective bubble. Molly runs off to investigate when she sees trucks advertising a chicken utopia called Fun-Land Farms on the mainland.

Fun-Land Farms is, it turns out, the new venture of the original film’s villain, Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson, still): It’s an elaborate fortress guarded by robotic moles and rocket-firing ducks, and run by Tweedy’s new mad-scientist husband, Dr. Fry (Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed). The secret sauce in Tweedy and Fry’s chicken recipe is a mind-control collar, paired with a Truman Show-style idealized artificial environment that means the factory’s chickens go to slaughter feeling happy and relaxed — and apparently much tastier that way. Ginger, Rocky, along with some old friends, set out to rescue Molly when she gets trapped in the system.

Image: Netflix

Obviously, some of these gags are easier to spot than others. Dawn of the Nugget has a gloriously silly non sequitur about one of those eye-scanning door locks no supervillain fortress is complete without, but also its fair share of set-pieces we’ve seen before, as the chickens sneak through air vents or disguise themselves as bushes. As usual for Aardman projects, the movie is gorgeously polished, but it’s also slow to find its rhythm, and as a sequel arriving 23 years after the original, it sometimes feels more like an obligation than a film the studio really needed, or wanted, to make. After a rote first half, things pick up once we enter the world of Fun-Land Farms.

That’s partly thanks to the filmmakers’ obvious love of those stylized ’60s espionage classics, which includes referencing deep cuts as well as broad ones. There’s a tart, satirical, almost paranoid edge to the mind-control conceit — a suggestion that a comforting, happy life as a good citizen is just lulling you toward the meat grinder — that’s reminiscent of an obscure, unforgettably weird British cousin to Mission: ImpossibleJames Bond The Prisoner. This cult 1960s TV show stars an extremely angry Patrick McGoohan (also the show’s creator) as a secret agent called Number Six who is trapped in an idyllic folly of a coastal village where everyone is friendly, but escape is impossible.

The unreal paradise in which the hens are kept is a topic of discussion Dawn of the Nugget and the schoolmasterly-but-sinister attitude of their captors (as well as the bowler-hatted restaurant buyer who wants to buy their nuggets) reminded me of The Prisoner’s suffocating dystopia of cream teas, bureaucracy, and a weird white blob that chased down any would-be escapees. I could just picture Ginger turning furiously to the camera and uttering Number Six’s famous cry: “I am not a number! I am a free chicken!”

Chicken Run: Dawn of the NuggetNetflix will start streaming the movie on December 15.