Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget footage was shown at Annecy Film Festival

Coming along twenty-three years after the release of the original Chicken Run, the sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget will be released through the Netflix streaming service on December 15th – and even though that date is still six months away, Aardman Animations founder Peter Lord, producer Layla Herbert, and director Sam Fell shared some footage from the film at the Annecy International Film Festival.

As described by Deadline, the footage shown featured the utopian island chicken haven – described by Fell as a sort of “Chicken Wakanda” – created by heroine Ginger after she led the breakout from the Tweedy farm in late 1940s Britain (in the first movie). It’s now the early ’60s and Ginger is the mother with Rocky of rebellious teenager Molly. Ginger in the meantime has buried her rebel side, devoting herself instead to keeping the peace in her island idyll. The arrival of the fortress-like Happy Land factory farm on the other side of the water will force Ginger to embrace her adventurous side once again.

Herbert described Ginger as “a reluctant hero. She’s a bit like Ripley in Alien. She is traumatized by what she has lived through. She doesn’t want to go back.“

The voice cast of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget includes Thandiwe Newton as Ginger, Zachary Levi as Rocky Rhodes, Bella Ramsey as Molly, Romesh Ranganathan as Nick, Daniel Mays as Fetcher, David Bradley as Fowler, Jane Horrocks as Babs, Imelda Staunton as Bunty, Lynn Ferguson as Mac, Josie Sedgwick-Davies as Frizzle, and Nick Mohammed as Dr. Fry.

Lord said that he and Aardman co-founder Nick Park had discussed various ideas for a sequel to Chicken Run (which was described as “The Great Escape with chickens”) over the years, but finally found the idea for Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget during a brainstorming session with the original film’s writer Karey Kirkpatrick. Here’s how: “We came up with the idea that if in the original they were breaking out, this time they would be breaking in.“

Fell was intimidated by the popularity of the original film, but was drawn to the sequel by the strength of the characters. He said Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget moves the story “into the ’60s and an era of industrial farming. We imagined this factory farm will be making nuggets, not just any old nuggets, the world’s first nugget. You can imagine that the recipe for the first nugget would be a highly guarded secret. It would be top security. We took that and kept pushing it and exaggerated this factory farm so it had a Bond villain’s layout with ridiculous security. It gave us kind of a genre to work in. We got into this notion of it being a Bond movie with chickens.“

Are you looking forward to Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget? Does the idea of “a Bond movie with chickens” sound interesting to you? Let us know by leaving a comment below.