‘Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget’ Team On Moving Into A New Era With Themes That Entertain & “Make You Think” – Contenders London
07.10.2023 - 13:03
/ deadline.com
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, the sequel to Aardman Animation’s 2000 stop-motion hit, is arriving 23 years after the original. Mused director Sam Fell during a panel at Deadline’s Contenders London today, “At the end of the first one, you’re kind of a bit sick of chickens. It takes about three or four years to make these things so I think everyone wanted to do new things.”
At the time, he also remarked, “Animated sequels weren’t a big thing back then, Toy Story 2 was probably the first great animated sequel.”
A follow-up had been “in the background” and there were “brainstorming sessions,” but the original Chicken Run “is so brilliant, you can’t do something less than that,” Fell said.
Fast-forward to 2016 and Fell ran into the previous film’s co-director Peter Lord who told him, “We’ve got it, we figured it out.” The trick was a single line, “This time, they’re breaking in.” That “opened up a whole sort of opportunity with a whole new kind of film like a heist movie.”
The story follows Ginger, who, having pulled off a death-defying escape from Tweedy’s farm, has finally found her dream – a peaceful island sanctuary for the whole flock, far from the dangers of the human world. When she and Rocky hatch a little girl called Molly, Ginger’s happy ending seems complete, but back on the mainland the whole of chicken-kind faces a new and terrible threat.
Dawn of the Nugget, premiering at the London Film Festival, will launch on Netflix December 15. Producer Leyla Hobart told Deadline’s Zac Ntim the project had the support of Lord and original co-director Nick Park as well as Aardman. “We’ve also got this really unique challenge of trying to bring all of that (heritage) but also create something new and I think Netflix