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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 was the perfect partner to help us find our way into the new era… In a really great way, in the UK people feel like they own a bit of Aardman and their characters.”
Although this is a family film, Ntim wondered about its political themes. Said Fell, “We wanted to make the film for now; it’s not just a nostalgia piece… We do work in big timeframes and big universal themes, like the big universal theme of life and death… And surviving… This gang of underdogs living away from the human world. How do you bring up a family in a hostile, very dangerous world. There are themes around how the world works that naturally fit into this. We did aim for big things… But the main thing for us is to make a super entertaining film that maybe makes you think a little bit.”
Dawn of the Nugget boasts a cast that includes Thandiwe Newton (Ginger), Zachary Levi (Rocky), Bella Ramsey (Molly) and Imelda Staunton (Bunty), along with Lynn Ferguson (Mac), David Bradley (Fowler), Jane Horrocks (Babs), Romesh Ranganathan (Nick), Daniel Mays (Fetcher), Josie Sedgwick-Davies (Frizzle), Serafinowicz (Reginald Smith), Nick Mohammed (Dr Fry) and Richardson (Mrs Tweedy).
Steve Pegram and Hobart are producers and screenplay is by Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard. Exec producers are Peter Lord, Nick Park, Carla Shelley, Fell, Paul Kewley and Kirkpatrick.
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