Stablemates: "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget" (2023) · 4:20pm Dec 27th, 2023
A bit un-eggs-pected, this, but since an Aardman feature recently made its debut, I thought I'd add it to my Stablemates collection. I mean, hay: no farm, no fowl.
Also, I put the title in speech marks because double colons bug the heck out of me, and I had to do something.
Blog Number 246: "Cocktail!" Edition
Couple of quick newsy things before we start.
Firstly, Krack-Fic Kai is doing fine. His financial crisis has passed and I think he's going to be OK. I figured some of you would want an update given my last blog post, so here's the good news. There are more people still with problems, though, as Krack-Fic Kai's latest blog post points out, but I recommend going straight to the horse's mouth on this one. Honestly, I have nothing to contribute beyond signposting. ↩
Secondly, in case it wasn't obvious: yes, I was disappointed I didn't so much as get a mention in the Imposing Sovereign IV results. Yes, I reacted badly at the time, though you're not getting the full extent of it because I don't see any advantage to indulging my worst sides. Nature is what we were put on this earth to rise above, and all that. It's just, well, fourteen months to get back into writing* shape...
* Strictly speaking, that's publishing shape, but quibbles, schmibbles.
Anyway, more relevantly: this month has been lousy on the writing front all over, and I'm hoping to turn things around before 2024. I missed the Christmas-themed fic opportunity, so I'm back to focusing on regular stuff instead. Hopefully, that'll help keep things relaxed.
And thirdly, Christmas went very well in my household. 😇 A little cosy shelter from a dank and dreary world. I've long since lost my enthusiasm for the materialistic stuff (still costs a fortune in presents, mind, and an online order turned up two days late, but what can you do?). For me, Christmas basically amounts to a family reunion plus a far healthier meal than I usually eat (roast potatoes and Brussell's sprouts, my god!). It's a day for quality time here, and while we didn't have as full a house as I'd have liked, it was still a nice day with family banter and bad jokes in Christmas crackers, so there's that! 🎅
OK, I think we're ready to tuck in! Let's get this roasting started!
Oh, and...
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Aardman Animations has a comfortable niche of its own, like if Ray Harryhausen had kept going and drunk too much British tea. You wouldn't necessarily know this from their earlier shorts work. I used to have an old VHS tape with an anthology of Aardman shorts on it - mostly 90s ones - including an early Creature Comforts clip, Not Without My Handbag ("My auntie. Is a zombie. From Hell."), Stage Fright (which is probably my favourite for comfortably telling a movie's worth of story in an economical ten minutes), and Pib and Pog, which is best described as an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon pretending to be a preschool babysitter show.
⚠ WARNING: NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!! ⚠
The point is that, over time, Aardman branched out from the popular Wallace and Gromit shorts which made their name - and in many ways cemented their arthouse style - to dabble in filmmaking. And I use "dabble" ironically, as stop-motion claymation is an insanely time-intensive and long-winded process even when your warehouse of props isn't burning down.*
* Luckily, the 2005 fire largely just wiped out old props and didn't affect much of anything new.
Unless you switch to CGI, films like that are going to take you a lot of dedication and patience to produce. So you're going to be either very good-natured about all the setbacks likely to accrue, or extremely daft to make that your business model in the first place. Of the two options, Aardman clearly chose: "Yes."
How we went from "Terminator-style sheep rustling" to this, I'll never know.
Blame Japan, I guess?
As a result, despite being in the movie-making business for roughly a couple dozen years, they've only produced seven stop-motion films. The other two were all-CGI affairs - Flushed Away, which in all other respects preserved their stop-motion aesthetic and idiosyncracies about as perfectly as it could with early-2000's DreamWorks breathing down their necks, and Arthur Christmas, hands down one of my favourite Christmas movies - so it should be quite telling that Aardman have only been in the sequels business twice, both of them very recently. The first time was with the utterly charming Shaun the Sheep franchise, which is a masterclass in completely wordless* acting and comedic beats. The second time... well, that's what we're here to discuss.
* Or technically unintelligible, as characters do "speak", but the sound is vague gibberish and all the actual communication we hear is in strictly nonverbal aspects such as tone and facial expression. It's not for everyone, but after the initial adjustment period I found I really liked it as a sort of "this is how kids probably imagine adults talk" or "this is probably what talk sounds like to animals such as sheep" experience.
I'm not gonna pull a Ghost Mike and trace the arthouse style in its entirety (though if Mike wants to contribute on that front, I absolutely will not stop him). This is mostly about my overall impressions of Aardman, though it doesn't hurt to give a little background.
Overall:
While I never get fully excited about Aardman - even the best Wallace and Gromit shorts are firmly in cosy charm mode with regular knee-slapping involved - what they have instead is a sense of comfortable, immersive daffiness, like a Dad joke that's actually pretty witty. The first Chicken Run demonstrates this at its best, with the whole plot making the most of the drab World War II prison camp aesthetic, just transplanted onto a funny animal movie involving arguably the daffiest animals you can think of*.
* Chickens. Not ducks.
Proposing a sequel with a radically different genre style is a bit of a risk, as it drops ingredients that worked the first time in favour of untested or awkward ones from a different context. Then again, there is some overlap between a WWII escape movie and a 60's Bondian heist movie. As the trailer-made line puts it: "Last time we broke out of a chicken farm; this time, we're breaking in!"
So anyway, enough preamble. Let's meet the meat!
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)
Overall verdict? If Chicken Run was great, then Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is...
...good enough. With occasional greatness here and there.
I'll get to the point: there's something off about this movie. I mean in a way that I think I've only seen once before, in the sloggier patches of Aardman's weakest effort Early Man. Comedically, the movie often feels slow-witted and clumsy. Not that the jokes aren't there - if this had been tightened up, there'd be more eye-rolling grins from me - but what jokes it does have go on a little too long or don't realize they're funnier if you cut them short instead of trying to extend them a couple of dialogue exchanges.
One example is when the chickens are trying to break into the compound, and at one point they take a photograph of a guard's eye - blinding him in the process - to hold up to a biometric scanner... only it turns out there's no fancy-schmancy computer on the other side, just another guard with a book full of eye photos who then has to compare them to what the door scanner shows her. That's funny, and a classic "silly old Aardman!" bait-and-switch gag.
I feel like in the original movie, this gag would have only been a few seconds long, maybe with a delayed reaction shot of the chickens getting impatient before the door opens. Instead, it feels like we're here for somewhere between thirty seconds and a full minute, at which point the novelty of the gag wears off. There's a bit too serious a moment where the chickens are confused and think it didn't work, I swear we cut to the staggering, blinded guard about three times, and the "actual" payoff is the book guard getting puzzled, going outside, seeing the blinded guard recover, tutting, and going inside. Wait, why are we doing this? They took a great quick gag and then dragged it out for the sake of a much weaker payoff. And unfortunately, it's not an isolated incident.
"That reminds me of an old man joke about that joke of an old man who rambled on and on about old man war things. It was around nineteen-dickety-two..."
It's a shame too, because arguably the funniest aspect of the movie is also the darkest (and the central plot point): the new farm's gimmick of artificially enhappifying* the chickens in order to make them outright gleeful about killing themselves for chicken nuggets. It's like that Douglas Adams joke from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe if they made a movie out of it, all for the laughably simple excuse of making the meat taste better (tense chickens make tough meat, don'tchaknow). Which is why one of the most successful gags is a cheesy educational cartoon (in-universe) explaining the principle, complete with ridiculously judgemental "model" family in the before and after portions.
* Yes, I've watched The Ghost and Molly McGee. It's a fun word I didn't know I needed!
See? Aardman's still in there somewhere. It's just stretched a bit too thin at times.
"It's Aardman, Ginge, but nae as we ken it..."
Genre-wise, the heist portion of the movie is good. Easily the best aspect comes from the chickens co-opting everyday household junk to improvise such things as distractions for the guards, scuba diving gear, and ways to get out of a garbage furnace or corn shredder. It isn't as prominent as I'd have liked, and it loses steam fast once they're actually indoors and don't have much to do other than run into each other or find out plot points. Still, it's childlike fun while it lasts, and the low-key resourcefulness feels like a clever echo of Aardman's own claymation philosophy: it's not what you have, but what you do with it that counts.
I'm less sold on the family drama angle, even though Molly gives me serious Hilda vibes (not just because both are voiced by Bella Ramsey) and a child explorer getting in way over her head is never not a winner (oh yes, she figures out how nuggets are made all right). Again, it feels like the bones are there - Aardman aren't shy about taking thin, osteoporotic cliches and giving them more marrow to make them work better than you'd expect (see: Shaun the Sheep Movie and its use of amnesia-via-head-bonking) - because Molly ends up being both an excuse to revisit why chickens need a paradise and a criticism of the suffocating nature of that paradise itself.
You know, gradually. In between periods of character chesspiece-moving and dealing with the farm's new gimmicks.
"It says: Sponsored by Soylent Green, the people company."
On that front, the ending kinda works for me as an escalation of the stakes (making chicken rescue their business instead of hiding in paradise suits me fine, especially given the sequel hook inherent in that change of plans). Trouble is that it feels too little, too late: I don't feel like there's enough oomph or connective tissue between that status-quo-breaking ending and most of what we've just witnessed, because hardly any attention has been drawn to it for the majority of the film's runtime. The obvious stop-gap measure would've been to build a connection with the chickens on the new farm similar to how we connected with them on the old one, and we don't. We only learn about one (Frizzle, an adorably Scouse big sister figure with a feather afro), and she's out of the movie for huge chunks of it, and has about as much connection with Molly as... say... that one jackass with Pinocchio on Pleasure Island.
The other reason the family drama feels kinda "there" is because, having been domesticated from their "lone free ranger"/"no chicken left behind" attitudes from the first movie, Rocky and Ginger - and, for that matter, the majority of the established cast - don't feel personally challenged by what happens here.
Round up the usual cluck-pecks.
It's easier to get the point with the side characters, namely Babs, Mac, Bunty, and Fowler. They were never not stereotypes in the first movie, but they each had a personal drive and stake in the escape attempts that made them feel more like, well, fleshed-out soldiers coping differently in a prison camp. Babs was living in blissful ignorance that occasionally cracked, Bunty was barely holding onto her rage and cynicism, and Fowler's lost in nostalgia and got one of the best moments with the "Old Crate" in the final act (to be fair, Mac rarely rose above "intelligent second-in-command" stock figure there either). Here? They're basically accessories for Ginger's heist who occasionally wander off and frequently remind us of their quirks (and sometimes barely even that: Bunty in this one feels completely neutered, whereas Fowler's written out of most of the action).
With their daughter in captivity (partly due to their own parenting conflicts), Ginger and Rocky have a stronger presence in the plot, but again, they feel a bit reductionistic as well. Rocky gets it worse, as he's mostly in bumbling braggart dad mode. Although that's a logical direction for him to go, given his arc in the first movie involved moving past his selfish womanizer habits and fraudulent bragging to become a bona fide competent hero, I feel like the movie could have done more with it than just use his storytelling as an excuse to recap the first movie. His daughter's been taken captive, and his sum total contribution is to blunder his way in, deliver witty quips, and improvise his way to success. It doesn't feel like he develops the same way as his first-movie incarnation did, so again his character comes across as being on mechanical autopilot.
To be fair, Ginger gets it better than the rest of the cast, seeing as Molly's rebellious attitude is ironically a reflection of Ginger's own can-do approach to life and a consequence of Ginger laying down the law. One of those traditional "parental hypocrisy but for noble reasons" deals. It's also kinda sad that the only time we see her unambiguously happy is when she's been captured and forcibly brainwashed into it, and anything that recalls the darkness of an Orwellian torture scene is fine by me. I do like how they split the difference between her being right about protecting Molly (I mean, geez the new farm alone is nightmare fuel incarnate once you get past the sillier trappings) and her being overprotective and hiding away from the world instead of confronting it. Had that been more of a focus, I'd be more ebullient about the movie.
"Nuts to this! I'm making my own chicken action movie! I'm gonna corner the market!"
Anyway, since we've segued from genre to cast, it would be remiss of me not to talk about the villains.
Long story short... eh.
"Do you expect me to squawk?" "No, Mister Rhodes, I expect you to... be dined upon."
Contrary to what seems to be the consensus, I think the best in show is Doctor Fry. Very kiddified and goofy as he is, let's not forget he's the mastermind behind the creepiest element in the movie, so he gets major irony points and an award for aptness. Never will he be main villain material, being too cringing and oblivious to hit that sweet spot, but he's a welcomely crazy take on villainy from prior Aardman films: he's not a self-absorbed sociopath like Mrs Tweedy or Trumper, he's not a melodramatic ham like Victor Quartermain or the Toad, he's not sympathetic like Agent Red or (if we allow villain protagonists) the Pirate Captain. He's just a Stepford Smile with certificates, kinda like if Babs became an ethologist.
Overall, he fits the concept as an extra bit of dark comedy, an Igor-like mad scientist in a simple food industry who acts overbearing and friendly despite his job involving slaughter for snacks. Plus he's obviously being used, so he gets minor sympathy points.
"Like a Chicken Phaal, you can't keep me down!"
By contrast, bringing Mrs Tweedy back feels like scraping the bottom of the barrel. Firstly, the excuse to bring her back instead of inventing a whole new level of threat feels weak. So she just dumped her old husband with the ruined farm - with neither money nor fame to her name, and a brand that collapsed before it could launch - and somehow not only got in contact with a wealthy, highly educated scientist but wooed him quickly enough to become his boss in the time it takes a chicken to grow to adolescence? Um, OK.
Secondly, we've seen and beaten her before: yes, villains lose nine out of ten movies anyway, but when we already have it on record that she's come away with egg all over her face, we don't even have that suspension of disbelief to look up to. Had we received a whole new threat, the question of how they'd be beaten would at least have more mystery and flexibility around it.
Thirdly, she works better with a grey, gritty comic relief like Mr Tweedy (remember that Mr Tweedy held a near-murderous grudge against Ginger most of the movie) instead of an inanely grinning dupe like Doctor Fry, and she doesn't work at all opposite Reginald Smith (the third villain, stretching the term), who's bland as toast dipped in water.
And fourthly, for all that she preserves some of the prior film's menace and snark, she actually comes across as less threatening in this one. What worked in the first one was that, when she finally stopped dreaming big and pushing her husband around, she entered the fray herself and immediately went axe-crazy, morphing into an outright slasher villain. She started off as a drab and unassuming (if domineering) housewife, so seeing flashes of deadly evil from her was a strong contrast. Whereas here, she's dressed like a cheesy Bond villain (a bad cheesy Bond villain, to be frank) from the get-go, so if anything seeing her talk and act normally is the contrast and the crazy villainy is what's expected.
Also, this movie has a problem with...
...reheated leftovers.
I was actually disappointed when she survived the nugget-making machine, because that at least would have been a fittingly dark and ironic ending, instead of which we get a child-friendly humiliated nugget monster who promised much but couldn't deliver.
That's one of the big problems with this movie: it's sanded off and made into kiddie shenanigans. Which isn't a bad thing in isolation - Shaun the Sheep makes good use of it - but the original movie wasn't sanded off by much and hardly ever delved into kiddie shenanigans. Dark elements remain, such as the enhappified would-be nuggets (heck, one chicken outright dies as part of the demonstration on how the farm operates, in one of the film's cleverer reuses of a trope from the first movie), but they sit awkwardly next to this new "dummy audience" sensibility that also neuters too many of the jokes and simplifies too many of the characters.
Apart from that? Well, I like the new "Farm of the Future" setting - even though we spend too much time in bland hallways, the most luxurious evil villain lair parts and overdesigned security measures do it for me*. The craftsmanship of Aardman's puppetry is as lovingly animated yet simply designed as ever, so you could watch the movie muted and still derive a lot of pleasure from it (arguably more, as you'd miss out on some of the clumsier dialogue).
* It's not a patch on the industrial hellscape that is Rupture Farms from the Oddworld series: now that's factory farm comedy.
And while I can't pretend this film is a must-see example of stop-motion, even on Netflix, it's still a basically affable bit of daft storytelling from Aardman. If that's enough for you, go right in. It's totally OK, I promise! Like... like having a holiday!
Anyone who's seen the movie now knows what a monster I am for putting this in.
Lastly, an update on "Stablemates" rankings:
- NIMONA (2023)
- Klaus (2019)
- Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)*
- The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)
- The Sea Beast (2022)
- Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)**
- My Little Pony: A New Generation (2021)***
- Back to the Outback (2021)
- Gnome Alone (2018)
* A special case, as I admire it a lot more than I personally like it, so take that as you will.
** I'm undecided about this one, and on another day would probably knock it one down the list. It depends on whether I'm emphasizing the hits or the misses.
*** Same as above. The deciding factors for me are: which one would I rather watch again, and which one do I think is better put together? They sometimes work at cross-purposes.
Also, as a bonus:
Stage Fright (1997)
Believe it or not, someone thought to put this as an extra on a Wallace and Gromit DVD. Like... yeah, fits like a glove, right!?
OK, that's all for now! Impossible Numbers, out!
Pretty much in sync with your take on this movie. It was a good enough watch with some quite fun gags, but nothing really outstanding.
BTW, I watched Klaus for the first time a few days ago and was genuinely impressed. I usually would rather run a marathon barefoot through a bombed-out Lego warehouse than watch an animated Christmas movie, but a few strong recommendations convinced me, and I'm very glad I did.
I skimmed most of this post as I no longer have Netflix and so haven't seen Dawn of the Nugget at all,¹ but that summary makes me less worried about waiting a while. I expect I'll get round to it eventually, but even the original Chicken Run is only in the "very good" category for me, not the "great" one that the likes of The Wrong Trousers inhabit. Mind you, I really rather like Early Man, so what do I know about this animation lark?
¹ I'm living in an unsustainable past I know, but a part of me can't help but feel that Aardman is a national treasure and that its stuff should be on the BBC, or at least in cinemas, not paywalled off on Netflix or some other part of the fragmented modern streaming landscape.
5761066
Ooh, it's been a while since I watched Klaus, and I think I should watch it again (if only to double-check my memory). I don't want to repeat what I said in the review I wrote, but I am definitely pleased you got as much out of it as I did.
I feel like I should have made more out of the fact that J.K. Simmons voices the eponymous Klaus, and it's so different from the more bombastic roles I associate with him. But damn did he nail it.
5761067
That's fair. It is spoilery and all.
Now I'll have to find a timeless classic on there, just to spite you!
But yeah, no, you're not missing much on the chicken front. What's weird is that I've seen the original Chicken Run on Netflix AND on Disney+ at the same time. Netflix makes sense, but I have no idea what loophole Disney+ exploited to grab this one. It's not like they're on speaking terms with either Aardman or DreamWorks.
My own favourite is A Close Shave, but we'd be splitting hairs either way, methinks. The Wrong Trousers is not far behind at all.
I find that one's at its best once it gets to the final match and the football tropes come thick and fast, but otherwise I get the impression it's... spinning wheels, I guess is the term I want? Aardman spinning wheels, I grant you (the messenger bird is genius, and the primordial soup gag and the duck joke are ace), but the prehistoric/early historic setting comes across as an overlong gag that occasionally wanders off course. So basically, yeah, yo just a freak, boi.
To balance it out, if I had to pick an Aardman movie that I like more than the consensus, it'd be The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Poor attempts at emotional stakes aside, it mostly comes across as "Pirates of the Caribbean if it reached Aardman by way of Looney Tunes", and I love that unembarrassed, anarchic kind of swashbuckling comedy.⚓
5761067
Whoops, sorry, the previous comment was meant to include you! Correcting that now.
Also, I'm going to tag the MLP: A New Generation review of mine with a "Stablemates" as well, just for retroactive blog consistency.
Oh man
My family (plus our cousin's family) saw the original Chicken Run at the pictures in one big outing.
We all love chooks and had chooks as egg-giving pets.
Chooks are wholesome creatures.
So there was much joy at seeing the trailer for a Chicken Run 2.
I just wish the trailer did not spoil the movie so much.
I actually wish I hadn't seen the trailer.