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Saturday, December 16, 2023

CHICKEN RUN: DAWN OF THE NUGGET (2023)

After disappointing results on EARLY MAN/’18, Aardman Animations’ Stop-Motion masters ran for cover all the way back to 2000's CHICKEN RUN for a safe sequel.  And it starts pretty well with what looks to be something of a WATERSHIP DOWN redux storyline . . . but with chickens instead of rabbits.  Utopian commune threatened by new development: stay, fight or flee?   If only they’d stuck to that idea.  Instead, young daughter-chick Molly rouses her parents to sneak into the new chicken nugget factory on the other side of the lake and start a bird rebellion.  Even this could work if only the film didn’t succumb to such a mixed animation palette of techniques.  In the process, losing much of what we celebrated in our CHICKEN RUN Write-Up on the enriching difficulties of plasticine model animation: ‘And because you can feel & occasionally see the effort, the joy of filmmaking becomes participatory.’  The only participatory element here would be buying CHICKEN RUN Branded Merch.  Not bad, but it feels like a knock-off, a retread; plus twenty minutes longer than the original and hitting the Life-Lessons-Learned button awful hard.  Passing the reins to PARANORMAN/’12 helmer Sam Fell (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/05/paranorman-2012.html), Aardmann founders Peter Lord & Nick Park lost the emotional force they generated with little but a furrowed brow on Gromit the Dog.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Stick with the original CHICKEN RUN or, even better, a collection of WALLACE & GROMIT shorts.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/chicken-run-2000.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/wallace-gromit-three-amazing-adventures.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Those great labor-intensive Aardman projects, including SHAUN THE SHEEP, all feel like they were made for the filmmakers themselves; NUGGETS feels like it was made for kids . . . and NetFlix.

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