When “Chicken Run” was released in theaters in June 2000, audiences and critics alike were charmed by the Claymation chickens Ginger and Rocky and the story of their escape from a sinister farm.
The movie, which was the first feature from Aardman Animations (home of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep), grossed more than $220 million and became the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film — a record it still holds.
Now the sequel “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” is finally arriving on Netflix. The director Sam Fell; Aardman’s creative director, Peter Lord; and the production designer Darren Dubicki explained what caused 23 years of delays.
At first it was sheer exhaustion.
Despite the instant success of the first film, Aardman, its partner on the production, DreamWorks, and the creators were in no rush to make a second one.
Sequels weren’t as much of an expectation then as they are today, and the arduous process of Claymation had left the team relatively exhausted and ready for a break.
“It’s like you’ve just run a marathon and someone says, ‘Hey, how about running another marathon?’ You think, ‘Well, not just now,’” Lord said. “So right back in 2000s, we were perhaps not ready. But after that, we had no objection to making a sequel at all.”
DreamWorks had agreed to make five films total with Aardman, but any potential new productions fell off the priority list. The Hollywood studio instead focused on other stop-motion animated projects that were already in the pipeline and quickly zeroed in on a sequel to “Shrek” after the original became a box office smash in 2001.
“So for a few years, the studio was sort of distracted, the relationship with DreamWorks finished and ‘Shrek’ arrived,” Fell said, adding that Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation at the time, “was probably more interested in ‘Shrek,’ too, by then.”
There was also a fire.
Even before sequel plans were in place, there was a setback: In Bristol, England, the warehouse filled with all the “Chicken Run” puppets, molds and sets caught fire. When it was time to start working on a second film, “we had to really start from scratch,” Fell said.
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