‘Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget’ Review: Refreshing Aardman Sequel Comes With A Playful ‘Mission: Impossible’ Vibe – London Film Festival
deadline.comBy any metric, 23 years is a long time to wait for a sequel to Chicken Run, even when you factor in the fiendishly slow gestation of Aardman Animations’ meticulous stop-motion process.
Surprisingly, it still feels fresh, not just because of the spring-clean of the core voice cast — Mel Gibson being the highest-profile casualty, lopped off as the “lone free-ranger” Rocky — but because, in the hands of director Sam Fell and his writing team, Dawn of The Nugget delivers a cleverly modern kind of family entertainment that, while it works to a formula, never feels written by committee.
The levels of peril it broaches are quite high, and may be disturbing for younger viewers, but the high-wire act it pulls off is to cover a very dark subject in an almost giddily Dayglo way that, this year at least, fills the unforeseen and indeed once unimaginable space between Barbie and The Zone of Interest.
Given that the lifespan of a chicken is about ten years tops, it’s fair to say that real time is not a factor here. A few years have passed, however, since Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) is now with Rocky (Zachary Levi) and has given birth to Molly (Bella Ramsey), whose transition from egg to a curious young person is covered with Up-style economy.
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