Review: Dawn of the Nugget
Chicken Run is my favourite prison escape movie. I adore it so much it was going to be my special subject on Hard Quiz. If only I’d made it past the audition.
The first feature film from Aardman Animation – creators of Wallace and Gromit – is a pastiche of The Great Escape, with an action sequence straight out of Indiana Jones. It’s also a movie full of women, with not one, but several Strong Female CharactersTM forming the brains, brawn and heart of their escape. It even passes the Bechdel Test.
My love for Chicken Run is also a sign of my broader love for stop-motion animation. Like writing, it’s work for masochists. It punishingly comes together inch by inch. The humanity of it touches me; animators leave their fingerprints on the puppets. Directors swear they can recognise the animator by their puppets’ performances. It’s tactile with a whiff of the homemade, but with more panache and precision.
So when Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget dropped on Netflix in the lead up to Christmas, I eagerly set aside time to watch it.
Things that wowed me
This time, the chickens are back for some Mission Impossible/James Bond-style hijinks.
In Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Ginger and Rocky have relaxed into commune life on a bird sanctuary island. They are also raising Molly, their chick, who ends up in the clutches of their arch nemesis, Mrs Tweedy. To rescue her, they must reconnect with their rebellious spirits. Last time they broke out of the chicken coop; this time, they’re breaking in.
Much of the script left me disappointed. But more on that later; there were plenty of things that wowed me.
Firstly, Dawn of the Nugget’s sets and colour schemes are gorgeous. The first film favoured earth tones; the brownish orange of chicken feathers, the greyish brown of the hen houses, the bluish grey of an overcast sky. The sequel is rich and pigmented. It’s technicolour. The chicken’s commune is lush with greenery and covered in flowers. It looks like paradise under the glow of lamplight, or the soft brush of sunrise.
Gorgeous 😍
But the scenes inside Mrs Tweedy’s factory are particularly special. The perpetually sunny dome where the captured chickens play – until it’s time to ascend a psychedelic escalator – and Mrs Tweedy’s chic, 1960s villain hideout are wonderfully garish.
Speaking of Mrs Tweedy, I didn’t expect to enjoy her…yassification. She’s rebranded herself as a glamorous entrepreneur (at least, she learned how to do winged eyeliner), and has remarried several times. I hope the first Mr Tweedy is experiencing his own yassification/rebirth/journey of self-discovery.
Good, but not as good as the original
My overall review of Dawn of the Nugget is: it’s good, but not as good as the original.
This is thrown into sharp focus by two things: different voice actors for key characters, and call backs to the first film. Julia Sawalha (Ginger) and Mel Gibson (Rocky) are replaced by Thandiwe Newton and Zachary Levi. Benjamin Whitrow (Fowler) passed in 2017 and is replaced by Daniel Mays. Timothy Spall (Nick) and Phil Daniels (Fetcher) are replaced by Romesh Ranganathan and David Bradley. The remaining cast returned to voice their original roles. They are all joined by Bella Ramsey (Molly) and Josie Sedgwick-Davies (Frizzle), who voice the new chicks on the block.
More than half of the Chicken Run cast has been replaced for the sequel
This cast give stellar performances. But I’ve memorised whole sections of Chicken Run, including the original cast’s performances. It feels strange to return to a fictional world where most of the characters sound different.
Dawn of the Nugget also makes several call backs to the first film. Among these are Rocky accidentally getting trapped in an oven (while referencing its heat) and the climactic chase scene featuring Mrs Tweedy and her axe. These call backs didn’t land for me; they felt protracted and flat.
The few references to the first film that did win me over were:
The slow build-up to the main titles music (so triumphant!)
A chicken death so horrifying it’s on par with the first film (so…haunting)
Many of the gags didn’t land for me either, even when they start on promising footing. When Molly is born, Babs says she’s made her a bicycle. She then reveals a drooping, knitted creation. A brilliant gag on its own (knitting is Bab’s answer to all her life’s needs), but it’s ruined by Ginger’s awkward reply: ‘Oh. You knitted one. What a lovely…thought.’ The joke overstays its welcome. It’s like when the chickens ask Nick and Fetcher, two scrounging mice, to help them rescue Molly. ‘It’s an impossible mission,’ says Nick. Instead of leaving the audience to put two and two together to find the gag (‘ohhh, it’s like Mission Impossible!), Fletcher has to chime in with: ‘Uh, shouldn’t it be the other way around?’
I will return to Chicken Run over and over again
Making a stop-motion film – making any film, making anything at all – is like setting up a long-exposure camera: you don’t know what it’s going to capture until you’re finished. You just have to hope it works.
Both films in the Chicken Run series deal with exploitation, death, rebellion and the pursuit of freedom. The first films does this in ways that feel too sophisticated for a kid’s film. And there’s the rub: Chicken Run is an intelligent, high-stakes prison escape film that just happens to be made in stop-motion animation. It was never a kid’s film. But Dawn of the Nugget, with its watered-down humour and pacing, feels like it is.
I enjoyed Dawn of the Nugget. But I will return to the first film over and over again. It makes me so damn happy.