Netflix’s Chicken Run 2 shifts the focus from The Great Escape to Mission: Impossible
This preview of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget comes from the film’s world premiere at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival.
The original 2000 Chicken Run is a delightful Aardman Animation stop-motion romp about a gang of chickens breaking out of a prison-like poultry farm. It takes its structure and imagery directly from classic prisoner-of-war escape movies, particularly 1963’s The Great Escape, which is why its cheerful plasticine characters inhabit such a grimy, lived-in world of barbed wire, wood, and brass, of contraptions cobbled together from old farm implements.
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. Its inspirations are still mid-20th-century movies, but longtime stop-motion director Sam Fell (ParaNorman, Flushed Away) has moved the focus from war stories to 1960s spy-movie futurism. This sequel takes place in a bright world of gadgets, lasers, sculpted metal, mechanized steel doors, and mind-control plots.
A primary inspiration here is the James Bond movies, but Dawn of the Nugget takes even more elements fromMission: Impossible — both the original 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.
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