Well, God and Gromit bless Netflix for signing checks and putting Aardman Animations on the task of serving up fresh stop-motion animated whimsy for us all.
But “fresh” doesn’t really figure in their laugh-starved, half-hearted sequel to 2000’s “Chicken Run.” That movie’s twee delights are sorely missed in “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” another chickens-take-on-Big-Poultry action comedy.
They’ve recast the voice leads of the first film, with Mel Gibson and Julie Sawahla replaced by Thandiwie Newton and Zachary Levi. And instead of the first film’s plucky riff on British WWII POW escape pictures like “The Colditz Story” and “The Great Escape” we get a gadgety spoof of “Mission: Impossible.”
While those changes aren’t deal breakers, they do portend a picture that lacks the verbal and visual wit, the spark and the edge that made the original film a classic.
Directed by Sam Fell (“Flushed Away,” “ParaNorman”) and scripted by “Chicken Run” alumni Karey Kirtkpatrick and John O’Ferrell, with “Adult Life Skills” writer-director Rachel Tunnard brought in to jolt the jokes, it never quite finds its footing or manages to string together sight gags that made the original film cluck along.
Leader-of-chickens Ginger (Newton) and blowhard/big-talker Rocky (Levi) hatch their daughter Molly on the idyllic, uninhabited and KFC-free lake island paradise they settled on when they and their entire chicken farm flew the coop all those years ago.
But idyllic chicken village aside, Molly (Bella Ramsey) longs to see the big wide world. When a massive new operation, Fun-Land Farms, sets up shop across the lake, brave Ginger advises they all hide. Tweenage Molly makes a break for it to see for herself.
She hooks up with a ditz named Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies) who is determined to get into “the happy chicken truck” to Funland, and next thing they know, they are in the truck and processed into the candy-colored theme park of a poultry farm.
This “farm” seems idyllic, until they notice the way everything looks like a stage set, all the chickens are wearing control collars and they spend their day frolicking on slides and gorging themselves on the feed.
And the two can’t help but notice the Bond villain lair where the humans in charge, Dr. Fry (Nick Mohammed) and his wife, our old nemesis Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) manipulate one and all in pursuit of the perfect place to raise and produce chicken nuggets.
Ginger, Rocky, Fowler (David Bradley), Babs (Jane Horrocks) and Bunty (Imelda Staunton) and their scavenger rat-pals (Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel Mays) conspire to “This time, we break IN” and free Molly.
Part of the charm of the films from this very British studio (“Shaun the Sheep” and “Wallace and Gromit”) has always been the oddly English world and worldview they capture and the quirky accents — Scots and Scouse and what have you — that the characters speak in. It makes the zingers quirkier.
“It’s GO time!”
“Oh, it’s all right. I went before we left.”
Levi has little funny to say and seems to have been cast because he can sound vaguely like Mel Gibson at 40. Newton’s playing the straight-woman here, and whatever sight gags the character experiences, it’s the “message” of the movie that Ginger must convey.
“Just because where we live is cut off from the world doesn’t mean we are too” is as nice a slap at Brexit as any animated film will ever manage.
But the most colorful, twinkly voices here belong to Horrocks, Staunton, Mays and the versatile Peter Serafinowicz as a poultry restaurateur.
The animation has a stop-motion with CGI-smoothed-out feel which makes this look more like “Flushed Away” than “Chicken Run.”
Which is to say there’s nothing here that’s actually bad. But every element is measurably inferior to the original film — plot, jokes, sight gags (a clever optical eye-scanner joke lands), voices and design.
Love Aardman. Glad Netflix helps keep their lights on. But let’s hope they can rediscover the DIY hand-made whimsy that made them famous next time out.
Rating: PG, the odd rude Britishism
Cast: The voices of Thandiwie Newton, Zachary Levi, Imelda Staunton, Bella Ramsey, Nick Mohammed, Jane Horrocks, Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, Peter Serafinowicz and Miranda Richardson.
Credits: Directed by Sam Fell, scripted by Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard. An Aardman film, a Netflix release.
Running time: 1:41
