‘Dawn Of The Nugget’ Reviews Roundup: Aardman’s ‘Chicken Run’ Sequel Maintains The Hand-Crafted Charm Of Its Predecessor

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Netflix’s stop-motion sequel to Aardman Animations’ first-ever theatrical feature Chicken Run, will hit the platform worldwide tomorrow, December 15.

The early current consensus among critics is that Dawn of the Nugget is a fun family film that Aardman fans will likely enjoy tremendously. It’s got all the hand-crafted charm of the studio’s previous productions, zhuzhed up with a bit of modern technology to expand the film’s scale.

While Dawn may have the aesthetic appeal of its predecessor, a common criticism of the film is that it lacks the narrative bite of the first film. Several reviews say that the danger faced by by the chickens 20 years ago is absent in the new film, and that Dawn lacks a sense of peril.

Dawn of the Nugget is directed by Aardman vet and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Fell (Flushed Away, ParaNorman). In the film, Ginger, Rocky, and their daughter Molly have settled down in an island sanctuary, far from the dangers of the human world. Molly, who has only ever known paradise, runs away when the boredom of her idyllic life becomes too much to handle. When Ginger learns about her daughter’s escape and that the girl has been trapped inside a factory farm, she assembles her flock to break into the Bond villain-inspired facility and save her daughter.

Here’s what critics are saying about Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.

Writing for Empire, John Nugent says the film offers up plenty of laughs, especially for those fond of British humor:

[I]t remains a gorgeously realized, and resolutely British, little adventure. Many of the returning and new side characters could not have come from anywhere else: Fowler is a perpetually befuddled RAF rooster straight out of Monty Python; Babs is pure Victoria Wood silliness; Frizzle is a Scouse chicken who says things like, “Me and you, kidda, all the way!” And Aardman’s fondness for parody and pisstakery remains undimmed: the evil chicken farm in this entry takes the form of an elaborate Bond-villain’s lair, with security guards, electric fences, and moats patrolled by laser-guided exploding ducks. It’s the sort of daft bank-holiday humor you wouldn’t expect to find anywhere else.

Variety’s chief film critic Peter Debruge appreciated that the film sticks to classic Aardman aesthetic decisions that have endured for decades:

Scripted by Chicken Run alums Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, along with newcomer Rachel Tunnard, the sequel doesn’t offer many surprises plotwise, but is consistently amusing in its dad-jokey kind of way. The folks at Aardman can hardly resist a good pun, and they load Nugget with a level of detail that will reward repeat viewings. Speaking of detail, the crew is now working with digital cameras so sharp, they had to go in and virtually scrub the dust and lint from their maquettes. But they’ve left a few fingerprints, which has long been the signature of a studio that embraces a certain degree of imperfection — just enough to reveal the artists’ hands behind the scenes.

Sophie Monks Kaufman at Indiewire enjoyed a lot about the film, especially the animation, but thought that Dawn of the Nugget was perhaps too cautious in the should-be high-stakes world of a prison break story:

For all the painstaking visual detailing, Dawn of the Nugget falls fowl of some standard-issue sequel anxiety. A sense of Sam Fell having big shoes to fill permeates the atmosphere and, as he tries to replicate what made the original beloved, we see the moving parts, much like the conveyor belt carrying brainwashed chickens to their doom. Whereas the original shocked us early on by using noir-ish shadows to represent a chicken’s death, there is a risk-averse approach to showing anything like that this time. While there’s lots of hooting and hollering about saving Molly, without proof that the film will go there, the peril seems cartoonish, and the eventual display of mass solidarity, which could have been a teachable moment for parents watching with children, is as throwaway as a misshapen nugget.

The Independent‘s Clarisse Loughrey says that despite the film’s massive scale, it still retains the charm of an Aardman production:

Aardman, as of late, has embellished its stop-motion traditions with a little CGI wizardry, so that the odd crowd scene and wide vista offers somewhat of a blockbuster scope. But that’s not why anyone watches these films, and the studio, thankfully, has dished out plenty of what people have come to see: silly, hodgepodge contraptions built with the British can-do spirit – subtle reminders that these stories are truly handmade creations. Babs (Jane Horrocks) is back, knitting crochet bicycles that immediately collapse into a heap, while others cook popcorn with a magnifying glass, or construct scuba diving kits out of bits of junk.

Leslie Felperin at The Hollywood Reporter agreed that Dawn is a very Aardman film, but that the distinction also brings with it a bit of baggage:

[T]he lack of cackle-worthy one-liners here and the entertaining but highly predictable last act make this a little bit snoozy for savvier viewers. After all, what could be more retro in a cartoon than a conveyor belt full of deadly dangers, a trope that goes back to the Max Fleisher cartoons of the 1930s? Think of those Popeye shorts where babies wander into construction sites. Aardman has put a climax with this sort of suspense in every one of their films, making for slapstick mayhem as signature as the company’s policy of changing figures’ pose every two frames instead of every frame — an approach that makes things look fractionally jerkier but is by this point part of the hand-crafted charm, like the knitting needles Babs is always clicking away at in the background. Plus, that slight scruffiness is something Aardman fans love, as intrinsically British as crumbling infrastructure, flavorless tea biscuits, and the political stupidity of voting for Brexit.