Netflix’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is a Mission: Impossible movie

This preview of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget was first released in conjunction with the film’s world premiere at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival. It was updated for the film’s Netflix release.

The original from 2000 Chicken racing is a delightful stop-motion game from Aardman Animation about a gang of chickens who escape from a prison-like poultry farm. The structure and imagery are directly based on classic prisoner of war escape films, especially from the 1963s The great escapeThat’s why his cheerful plasticine figures inhabit such a dirty, inhabited world of barbed wire, wood and brass, of implements cobbled together from old farm equipment.

Netflix’s long-in-the-making sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, is a similar film – tongue-in-cheek, specifically British fun for all ages – but looks strikingly different. His inspiration is still mid-20th century films, but longtime stop-motion director Sam Fell (ParaNorman, Washed away) has shifted the focus from war stories to 1960s spy film futurism. This sequel is set in a bright world filled with gadgets, lasers, shaped metal, mechanized steel doors and mind control schemes.

A main inspiration for this is the James Bond films, but Dawn of the Nugget takes out even more elements Mission impossible – both the original television series from the 1960s to 1970s and the later film adaptation, which has become Tom Cruise’s life’s work. According to Fell and the production team who attended the film’s world premiere at the London Film Festival, the idea for a sequel to Aardman’s most popular film began with a single phrase that lives on as a slogan: “This time they’re the ones to break.” In!” The focus of the film is pretty simple: an escape film has become a heist film in which the chickens infiltrate a high-tech farm that isn’t quite what it seems.

The setup consists of the practical Ginger and the ruthless Rocky – now played by Westworld The main actors Thandiwe Newton and Zachary Levi, who replace Julia Sawalha and Mel Gibson in the original, have settled with the rest of the freed chickens on a secret island hidden from human eyes. They live an idyllic life there, but the couple’s daughter, Molly (The last of us Co-star Bella Ramsey) has a natural adventurous spirit that combats Ginger’s overprotective bubble. One day, Molly spies trucks on the mainland advertising a seemingly utopian chicken paradise called Fun-Land Farms and runs off to investigate.

Fun-Land Farms, it turns out, is the new venture of the original film’s villain, Mrs. Tweedy (as of Miranda Richardson): it’s an elaborate fortress guarded by robotic moles and rocket ducks, and by Tweedy’s new weirdos to be led. The scientist’s husband, Dr. Fry (Ted Lassois Nick Mohammed). The secret sauce in Tweedy and Fry’s chicken recipe is a mind control collar paired with a Truman ShowAn idealized artificial factory-style environment that means the factory’s chickens go to slaughter happy and relaxed – and are apparently much tastier that way. When Molly gets caught up in this devious system, Ginger, Rocky and some of their old friends set out to free her.

Image: Netflix

Some of the gags this setup suggests are more obvious than others. Dawn of the Nugget has a wonderfully silly non sequitur about one of those eye-catching door locks that no supervillain fortress is complete without, but also a bunch of set pieces we’ve seen before, like the chickens sneaking through vents or disguising themselves as bushes. As is usual with Aardman projects, the film is wonderfully polished but also slow to find its rhythm, and as a sequel arriving 23 years after the original, it sometimes feels more like an obligation than a film the studio was making really needed or wanted. make. The first half goes smoothly, but once the action shifts fully into the surreal world of Fun-Land Farms, the energy increases and the ideas start flowing.

That’s thanks in part to the filmmakers’ obvious fondness for these stylized ’60s spy classics, which references both deep and wide cuts. There’s a tart, satirical, almost paranoid note in the idea of ​​mind control – the suggestion that living a comfortable, happy life as a good citizen will only lead you to lull yourself into the meat grinder – reminiscent of an obscure, unforgettably strange British cousin remind Mission impossible and James Bond: The prisoner. This cult 1960s TV series stars the extremely angry Patrick McGoohan (also the show’s creator) as a secret agent named Number Six, trapped in the idyllic folly of a seaside village where everyone is friendly However, escape is impossible.

Something about the unreal paradise where the chickens are locked up Dawn of the Nugget and the schoolmasterly but sinister demeanor of her captors (as well as the bowler hat restaurant buyer who wants to buy her nuggets) reminded me of that The prisoneris a suffocating dystopia of cream teas, bureaucracy and more strange white blob that hunted every possible fugitive. I could imagine Ginger angrily turning to the camera and making Number Six’s famous cry: “I’m not a number! I’m a free chicken!”

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget Stream now on Netflix.