Delicious sequel – The Hollywood Reporter

“Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget”

ardman

British production company Aardman is best known for award-winning short films such as Evergreen. creature comforts and franchises ranging from short stories to full-length features such as: wallace and gromit and shaun the sheepspecializes in “claymation,” a stop-motion animation that uses figures made from clay. Even by the glacial standards of animation production, creating new work takes a long time. In Anglicist terms, their work might be described as rare as a hen’s tooth. That’s because it remains their most successful feature film (and the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time). chicken run (2000) is a family film set on a 1950s poultry farm, starring a flock of poultry with anatomically incorrect but very Aardman-esque overbite teeth.

But good things come to those who wait, and the studio’s sequel includes: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, is a suitable successor. The previous game brings together a group of feathered friends who have made a break for freedom. Hen Ginger (voiced by Julia Sawalha in the original, here rather cruelly dumped for the supposedly “younger-sounding” Thandiwe Newton) and her American rooster lover Rocky is led by (Mel Gibson is replaced by Zachary Levi) nugget The team sees Ginger and Rocky’s daughter Molly (Bella Ramsay) break into the high-tech factory farm they have fled.After the incident, the group was fed up with life on the island they fled to. chicken run, and seduced by a tempting photo of an idyllic garden-dwelling chicken peeking out on the side of a truck, Molly meets another out-of-control teenage girl chicken, Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick Davis). Team up and infiltrate the factory. .

It was exactly the pastel-colored paradise they had imagined, but there was a fatal pitfall.Once upon a time, Ginger, Rocky and their friends, the matriarch Bunty (Imelda Staunton), Mac (Lynn Ferguson) and Babs (Jane Horrocks), plus the stubborn old rooster Fowler (David Bradley) and the helpful mouse Nick and Fetcher (Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel Mays, respectively) — Find out what happened, they started breaking down into the The factory, a reversal of the previous work, and saving Molly.

Of course, others do as well, but the latter decision turned out to be a secondary benefit rather than the main objective. Much like city people who move to the countryside and keep chickens for pets and eggs, but never dream of eating the birds themselves, this movie makes us empathize with these particular chickens. As much as it wants it to, it doesn’t truly challenge viewers to question the ethics of chickens. Eating chicken in general. I wouldn’t say it’s vegan friendly.

The director this time is Sam Fell (paranorman, flash away) Instead of chicken runOG Aardman’s reboot from Peter Lord and Nick Park (who here serves as executive producer), this reboot stays true to the retro, handmade spirit of the original, with a quirky visible thumbprint. It’s literally obvious. at the same time, nugget It subtly capitalizes on some of the industry’s technological advances over the past 23 years. For example, CGI is used to represent his flock of 1,000 birds, which is required in some shots.

Nevertheless, this is very close to the Aardman look, offering a mid-20s^th-A world of make-it-yourself spirits, where centuries-old scarves and sweater vests and low-tech mechanical contraptions are everywhere. This movie is more suitable for young children than it is for young children and their parents to enjoy it equally. Grandparents.

Its bias toward older viewers is felt in the 1960s visual references, particularly the brutalist concrete structures that Ken Adams designed for the Bond films. Dr. No (1962) and goldfinger (1964). It’s also a gag-lite script (credited to Carly Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell, and Rachel Tunnard, based on a story by Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell). First of all, compared to chicken runthere are far fewer bird-themed puns here, and none of the clever, edgy small talk found in many other modern comics.

Instead, the humor is primarily situational, playing up the disconnect between the chicken’s innocent worldview and the viewer’s more experienced insight. So perhaps the funniest line is when Frizzle and Molly loudly talk about how excited they are about the promise of getting their own bucket, and Frizzle rhetorically says, “What chicken wouldn’t want a bucket?” It comes up when you ask a specific question.

Aside from that throwaway gag, the lack of chuckle-worthy one-liners here and the funny but highly predictable ending make it a little annoying for astute viewers. After all, there’s nothing more retro in comics than a conveyor belt full of deadly danger, a trope that goes back to the Max Fleischer comics of the 1930s.think about them Popeye A baby in shorts wanders into a construction site. Aardman climaxes each of his films with this kind of suspense, marked by slapstick mayhem as much as the company’s policy of changing figure poses every two frames instead of every frame. This approach makes things look a bit choppy, but at this point some of the handmade charm is complete, like the knitting needles Babs is constantly clicking in the background. Plus, that bit of filth is what Aardman fans love, as is the crumbling infrastructure, the tasteless tea biscuits, and the political stupidity of voting for Brexit.