Twenty-three years after the original Chicken Run (2000), Aardman Animation delivered a very belated sequel, directed by Sam Fell, set several years after the events of the first film. Original voice cast leads Mel Gibson and Julia Sawalha were gone (bizarrely, she was told in 2020 that she sounded “too old” for the role, a revelation that led to accusations of agism being levelled at Aardman) with Zachary Levi and Thandiwe Newton replacing them as Rocky and Ginger.

Some time after their daring escape from Mr and Mrs Tweedy’s Farm, Ginger, Rocky and the rest of the chickens have made a new, idyllic life for themselves on an island in a lake, safe from the murderous hands and appetites of humans. Ginger and Rocky are parents now, to an inquisitive and adventurous 11-year-old named Molly (voiced by Bella Ramsey) and their old rat friends Nick (Romesh Ranganathan) and Fetcher (Daniel Mays) turn up regularly bringing supplies. All seems well until the chickens spot a construction site on the mainland and Ginger begins to suspect that it’s for a new chicken farm. Mollie, looking for adventure and escape from her over-protective parents, sneaks off the island to investigate, meeting teenage chicken Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies) along the way. They stow away on a truck full of chickens being taken to Fun-Land Farms, a vast, hight-tech slaughterhouse run by the chickens’ old adversary Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), where captive chickens are kept in a state of electronically induced ecstasy on the grounds that happy chickens make for tastier nuggets. Tweedy is in cahoots with eccentric scientist Dr Fry (Nick Mohammed) and dopey fast food entrepreneur Reginald Smith (Peter Serafinowicz), who she hopes will be her first big customer. It’s up to Ginger, aided by Rocky, Babs (Jane Horrocks), Bunty (Imelda Staunton), Mac (Lynn Ferguson), Fowler (David Bradley), and the rats to break into Fun-Land, rescue Mollie and free the other chickens before the dawn of the nugget…

Technically, Dawn of the Nugget is brilliant – of course it is, this is Aardman we’re talking about. But it’s an inferior sequel, though even merely “OK” Aardman (and that’s what this is – merely “OK”) is better than most films of its ilk. It’s packed with the kind of gags, visual and verbal, that we’ve come to expect from the company, thanks to returning scriptwriters Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, but there’s something missing, something not quite “right” about the film.

Maybe it’s just technically too good. The stop motion animation that was a hallmark of Aardman’s work is just too slick, so smooth that it frequently looks like CGI, lacking that tactile, hand-made feel that the best of stop motion offers. Maybe the story, a reversal of the original film (“last time, we broke out of a chicken farm. Well, this time, we’re breaking in!”) just doesn’t cut it like it should. The original had been a playful parody of The Great Escape (1963) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm, while Dawn of the Nugget is much more informed by the Mission: Impossible films, which are spoofed by name and theme tune throughout, wild action set-pieces (brilliantly done) now being the order of the day. The first film had felt pleasingly lost in time, while this sequel is unashamedly contemporary.

Whatever the reason, Dawn of the Nugget just doesn’t quite cut it. There’s no questioning the technical brilliance of it all, from the design of Mrs Tweedy’s Bond villain like lair to the action scenes that will leave you marvelling at the patience of the animators, and it’s certainly extremely funny at times. But it can also feel just a little soulless, like it was constantly being overwhelmed by its ambitions, which may also explain why it’s more spectacular than its predecessor, but less consistently funny. One of the best things about the film is the way that it very wittily contrasts the resourceful craftiness of the chickens with the slovenly ineptitude of the greatly expanded cast of human characters – you almost (though not really) feel sorry for the appalling Mrs Tweedy, the only human with more than a handful of functioning brain cells, surrounded by complete idiots who are easily outwitted by birds.

The voice cast is mostly excellent, though Levi never really matches Gibson’s exuberance. Gibson was never invited back by Aardman or even, it seems, considered for the role: “Mel was a fabulous choice for Rocky when he was this playboy rooster,” Fell told The Hollywood Reporter. “He was a movie star and Rocky was a movie star. It was perfect. But now Rocky’s more vulnerable. He’s a first-time father. It’s more Ginger’s movie, so his role is different.” Which is certainly all very true, though Gibson, despite starting to recover his tarnished reputation a decade earlier, was still a controversial figure after his widely reported racist and anti-Semitic outbursts in the 2000s. Of the replacement cast, Newton does better than Levi as Ginger, still the smartest chicken in the coop, and the supporting cast is made up of very familiar voices from British television and stand-up comedy, all seemingly having a ball.

Though many critics were kind to Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget when it turned up on Netflix in December 2023, some noted that there were signs that “diminishing returns” were setting in, that the film simply wasn’t as good as the original. But it would be terribly wrong to dismiss Dawn of the Nugget out of hand. Had it not been a sequel to one of the best and most popular stop motion films ever made, one might have been inclined to go easier on it. But it is and one can’t quite contain a feeling of disappointment that it can’t quite match the original. But even sub-par Aardman is good fun in its own way and Dawn of the Nugget should keep a new generation of Rocky and Ginger fans happy for a while, even if it’s unlikely that the film will later be seen as much more than just another film – a fair-to-middling one from a company that we’ve come to expect something like genius from.