Have you ever spent quality time with a chicken? I raised them as a teenager, and I do not particularly recommend it. They can be smelly and dirty. They’re honestly not very bright. Yet they’re like living cartoons, weird and funny to watch, with spindly little legs holding up plump little bodies. They cluck disapprovingly when you take their eggs, and they’ll eat anything you dump in their yard (including, uh, chicken).
It’s the species’ natural slapstick that made them prime fodder for “Chicken Run,” the 2000 runaway success, which was also Aardman Animations’ first foray into feature-length stop-motion filmmaking. The studio had previously been best known for Wallace, a middle-aged inventor with a cheese addiction, and his silent but clever dog Gromit, who always helped him out of scrapes. In their chickens, though — with close-set beady eyes and faces far more expressive than a real chicken’s stolid look could ever be — the studio located comic gold.
In “Chicken Run,” the humans are the villains, especially Mrs. Tweedy, the cruel owner of a chicken farm where the detainees are eventually made into pies. (The film’s creative team have said it started as a spoof of the 1963 adventure film “The Great Escape.”) The chickens wish to remain outside the confines of pastry and, ideally, get away from horrible Mrs. Tweedy and her horrible meek husband altogether. (He is certain the chickens are organizing, but she ignores him.)
At the end of that film, the chickens escape, a caper led by an intrepid red hen named Ginger. The start of “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” a sequel over two decades in the making, retells the escape story quickly — for the benefit of the viewer as much as an egg, the soon-to-be-hatched offspring of Rocky the Rooster (voiced by Zachary Levi, replacing Mel Gibson) and Ginger (Thandiwe Newton, replacing Julia Sawalha). It’s been a while since the daring escape, and the chickens are living on an island paradise, knitting and making jam and telling war stories and doing whatever else a stop-motion chicken might wish to do with total freedom from fear. No pies are in sight. No Tweedy menaces. “I think it’s time to put the past behind us,” Ginger tells Rocky, and as their newly hatched little chick Molly grows, they decide not to tell her about their life back at the farm. The only link to the mainland is Nick and Fetcher, the pair of scavenging rats who arrive with a load of “quality old junk” every month.
Yet of course, Molly wants to know what’s on the other side of the water, setting off a caper with strong overtones (including the musical sort) of “Mission: Impossible,” sprinkled with some references to Bond villains, “The Truman Show,” “The Stepford Wives” and probably some other movies I missed. “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” directed by the Aardman stalwart Sam Fell, is in many respects a cover song, a repeat of the beats and characters of “Chicken Run.” But when the source material was so fun, the cover is bound to be enjoyable, and this one is, even if it sags a little around the two-thirds mark. There’s punning, and contraptions, and ducks that shoot lasers out of their eyes. It’s a good time.
The film can be read, without stretching, as a broadside against factory farming (or maybe eating chickens generally), as well as an existential examination of the nature of freedom. But what might be most interesting about “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” is how it echoes a theme of many animated films for children, everything from “Finding Nemo” to “Elemental”: the overprotective parent who needs to calm down and let their kid have an adventure. Since plenty of these films are the product of people with children of their own, there’s probably a little self-exhorting going on. As memes and social researchers attest, children today have far less freedom to roam about their neighborhoods than the youngsters of, say, “Stranger Things.” The insistent recurrence of the theme suggests, at minimum, a culture-wide anxiety, the kind that will be hard for observers in the future to miss.
But then, this is a movie about chickens, and togetherness, and about not leaving anyone behind, and also about a paradise for fowl on an island where they can build their own little thatched houses and knit their own little bicycles. Its lessons are gentle, its comedy endearing. These chickens, at least, are a pleasure to be around.
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix.