(courtesy IMP Awards)
There’s not enough whimsicality in the world.
To be fair, past and current events don’t really allow much time for quirky playfulness to do its thing but as you watch Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, which does its share of dark and scary moments, you appreciate anew just how much we need life to be imbued with the sort of soul-lightening whimsicality that Aardman, the movie’s producers have reliably given us for just over half a century.
While Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget may not be the best thing the company has ever done, it is proof that even slightly subpar Aardman is a good deal better than many other companies’ top shelf efforts.
Sufficiently light, bright and idiosyncratically comedic to make you smile at regular intervals and to bask in the joyful fun of some very sharp and richly-observed characterisation, the film picks up some years after the end of Chicken Run (2000) where we find Ginger (Thandiwe Newton, replacing Julia Sawalha) and Rocky (Zachary Levi, replacing Mel Gibson) living with the rest of their chicken farm escapees on an idyllic island in the middle of a remote lake far from anywhere in particular.
With good friends like Bunty (Imelda Staunton), Mac (Lynn Ferguson), Fowler (David Bradley) and Babs (Jane Horrocks) around them, and regular deliveries of essential goods and gadgets by scavenger rats Nick (Romesh Ranganathan) and Fletcher (Daniel Mays), and no threat of being eaten, theirs is an utopian existence full of blueberry picking, popcorn-making and quiet bucolic days in the sun-dappled shade.
Who wouldn’t want a life like that?
Well, Ginger and Rocky’s daughter Molly (Bella Ramsey) for one who, unscarred by the horrors of life under the chicken farm’s nightmarish owner, Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) dreams of rowing acoss the water and partaking in the delights of Fun-Land Farms, a new chicken farming establishment set up perilously close to the island which promises all the excitement 11-year-old Molly feels she’s missing in her all-too-small island home.
So, one night Molly sets off to see what life is like where things aren’t safe and predictable, and after meeting up with garrulously loopy Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies), she finds herself right in the heart of Fun-Land’s technicolour chicken playground which is full of fun rides like the egg cup – rather creepily, the figure above the ride is Humpty Dumpty eating a runny eggs with a toast soldier; this is but one example of the way the giddily delights of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget are subverted with some quite chilling, bucket-full of nuggets, elements – and a slippery ride which the resident chickens ride with an almost mindless pleasure.
Molly is happy, as is Frizzle about their exciting, thrilling and super fun home until they begin to realise something is amiss and that like just about everything that’s too good to be true, a snake is very much lying in the idyllic grass.
Getting out of the Bond villain-meets-Thunderbirds HQ factory though won’t be easy though so Molly is lucky that Ginger, Rocky, Babs (who, god bless her, is as daft as she ever was, providing much of the comic silliness that the film needs), Mac, Bunty and Fowler are on the case and set out to break from her prison which comes with a fairly final sentence.
The question is, of course, is whether Ginger et. al will get everyone out in time before the head of the Sir Eat-a-Lot chain of restaurants, Reginald Smith (Peter Serafinowicz), comes to pick up his first lot of chickens at dawn the next day.
What follows is a riotously madcap rescue attempt that is full of trademark Aardman silliness, some real stakes which Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget doesn’t minimise for a second in favour of cute and fluffy good vs. evil battles, and some wonderfully amusing moments of slapstick brilliance which culminates in a considerable gaggle of chickens racing out of the factory and into a truck when they then drive, rather haphazardly but successfully, to freedom.
While the film doesn’t quite reach the absurdist heights of many of Aardman’s earlier films, it is still a buoyantly escapist jaunt which exhibits cinematic influences as diverse as Mission: Impossible, Braveheart and The Great Escape, with all of their elements woven masterfully into a story that balances the dark and the whimsically lights with near-flawless perfection.
What’s so enjoyable about Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is that it is embodies the slightly daft can-do attitude that sits happily at the core of much of Britain’s storytelling.
There is, to be fair, a great deal stacked against Ginger, Rocky and the gang being successful, but does that stop them? Not even a little bit, and a great deal of the fun comes from how wacky and over-the-top characters take on a challenges that no chicken in their right mind should ever consider.
But then Ginger is not your average chicken, and while she might have gone off the revolutionary boil as she does her best to make life as safe as chickenly possible for her daughter, there still beats within her feathered chest the need to take on great evil and beat it, especially if it means keeping her fellow chickens free.
Ginger is an absolute joy and inspiration, and it’s her can-do spirit, which Molly has also inherited that powers the momentum of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget‘s narrative which is brimming with the idea that if you see something untoward and wrong that you MUST do something about it.
And not just because someone you love is in danger; while Ginger might start off on her perilous mission simply save Molly, the scope of her adventurous endeavour widens and widens as this delightful film goes on, and she discovers that she is far from done fighting for what’s right.
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is a sturdy, silly and thoroughly entertaining sequel which may not quite have the emotional heft of its predecessor or the farcical looniness of other Aardman movies but it is nevertheless a spirit-lifting gem that reminds how good it is to see evil bested, the good chickens come out on top and to have it all happen with top-rate animation, wonderfully-wrought characters and a sense of the ridiculous neatly bound in with some really consequential storytelling.