It’s a story that mother hens still cluck to their chicks every night before bed: More than 20 years ago, on a dark night in the English countryside, a flock of daring chickens made a great escape. Not satisfied with being someone’s lunch meat, they fought for their lives — and found their way to a poultry paradise. That was the story of Chicken Run, and it was marvelous. With a new sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, now streaming on Netflix, now is the perfect time to refresh your Chicken Run memories — the original film is also currently streaming.
“We pitched it to Steven Spielberg over dinner, and the pitch was, ‘Steven, we’re going to do The Great Escape with Chickens,’ ” Chicken Run co-director and Aardman Animations co-founder Peter Lord told Netflix about the film’s origin story, referencing John Sturges’ 1963 classic. “I remember he said, ‘I love it. The Great Escape is one of my favorite movies of all time. And I keep chickens.’ ”
“The Great Escape with chickens” proved as irresistible a concept to audiences as it did to Spielberg. Chicken Run follows Ginger, a plucky young chicken who’s not content with her life in the grim prisons of Tweedy’s Farm. She’s surrounded by a flock of charming but complacent hens who are happy to while away the hours laying eggs and — in the case of scene stealer Babs — knitting. When cocky rooster Rocky crash-lands in the chicken coop, Ginger convinces him to train the chickens to escape in exchange for the flock’s silence.
But things soon take a dark turn for the group when Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy grow impatient with their hens’ declining egg production. As a solution, the pair decide to ramp up food rations and purchase the equipment needed to build a massive Rube Goldberg–esque machine meant to efficiently transform the chickens into chicken pies.
Rocky and Ginger continue their quest to teach the flock to fly, but one day disaster strikes: Ginger is chosen as the pie machine’s first subject. Rocky swoops in to save the day and the machine is put on the fritz, buying the chickens valuable time. Soon, their plan hits another snag: Rocky reveals to them that he was in fact a part of a “chicken cannonball” circus act. He can’t fly after all, and he hits the road. Despair sets in for the flock. But not for good. Not if Ginger has anything to say about it.
If the chickens won’t fly, they’ll build something that can. With the help of elderly chicken Fowler (who throughout the film claims to have been a member of the Royal Air Force), Ginger begins to build a makeshift plane, cobbled together from scraps of wood and the chicken coops themselves.
On the night the chickens are destined for the pie machine, they finally make their daring escape, hog-tying (chicken-tying?) Mr. Tweedy and preparing to take off. At the last moment, Fowler makes a concerning announcement: He’s never actually flown a plane. “Good heavens, no!” he clucks. “I’m a chicken! The Royal Air Force doesn’t let chickens behind the controls of a complex aircraft!”
That won’t stop Ginger, though. Soon, Fowler is behind the controls all the same, and the chickens are on their way to freedom. But wait! Mrs. Tweedy is on their trail, climbing up a tangled string of lights to stop the madness and reclaim her flock. Rocky returns, but soon it’s up to Ginger to cut the line and save the day. She dodges an axe swipe, for a moment appears headless — and then Ginger picks her head up and lives to fight another day, revealing that Tweedy has in fact cut her own line, sending her plunging back to earth. The chickens land in an idyllic island paradise and begin the process of raising the next generation of precocious poultry.
For Aardman, Chicken Run was a leap almost as big as the chickens’ flight to freedom. It was the company’s first feature-length film, following their Oscar-winning series of Wallace & Gromit short films, and a significant financial risk: Stop-motion animation had a mixed history at the American box office. But like the film’s characters, it landed on its feet, becoming the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time.
All the same, it took more than two decades to get a sequel off the ground, during which Aardman won another Oscar (for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) and lost some old friends. “We had a big fire at our storage facility,” Lord said. “And in that fire, all our [clay] chickens were roasted — permanently. Everything was lost.”
But even that couldn’t stop a Chicken Run sequel from finally materializing. In the end, it just took a great idea. “[It’s been] marinating quite a while,” Lord said. “I found an email recently, 10 years old, mentioning it.” Directed by Flushed Away and ParaNorman co-director Sam Fell, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget picks up the first film’s story right where we left off, with Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) and Rocky (Zachary Levi) raising a plucky young hen of their own, Molly (Bella Ramsey). When she’s chick-napped by nefarious fast-food forces, the chickens must embark on yet another daring caper. This time, they’re breaking in.
In the wake of Aardman’s tragic storage fire, rebuilding the world of Chicken Run had a surprising power. “To see those chickens re-created, resurrected was very moving, actually,” Lord said. “And the first time I saw them again, the model makers had gone back to the first principles and re-created them. That was extraordinary.” Almost as extraordinary as the story of a chicken flock making their great escape.
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is now streaming on Netflix. Get your nests ready.
