When “Chicken Run” was released in theaters in June 2000, audiences and critics alike were charmed by the Claymation chickens Ginger and Rocky and the story of their escape from a sinister farm.
The movie, which was the first feature from Aardman Animations (home of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep), grossed more than $220 million and became the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film — a record it still holds.
Now the sequel “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” is finally arriving on Netflix. The director Sam Fell; Aardman’s creative director, Peter Lord; and the production designer Darren Dubicki explained what caused 23 years of delays.
At first it was sheer exhaustion.
Despite the instant success of the first film, Aardman, its partner on the production, DreamWorks, and the creators were in no rush to make a second one.
Sequels weren’t as much of an expectation then as they are today, and the arduous process of Claymation had left the team relatively exhausted and ready for a break.
“It’s like you’ve just run a marathon and someone says, ‘Hey, how about running another marathon?’ You think, ‘Well, not just now,’” Lord said. “So right back in 2000s, we were perhaps not ready. But after that, we had no objection to making a sequel at all.”
DreamWorks had agreed to make five films total with Aardman, but any potential new productions fell off the priority list. The Hollywood studio instead focused on other stop-motion animated projects that were already in the pipeline and quickly zeroed in on a sequel to “Shrek” after the original became a box office smash in 2001.
“So for a few years, the studio was sort of distracted, the relationship with DreamWorks finished and ‘Shrek’ arrived,” Fell said, adding that Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation at the time, “was probably more interested in ‘Shrek,’ too, by then.”
There was also a fire.
Even before sequel plans were in place, there was a setback: In Bristol, England, the warehouse filled with all the “Chicken Run” puppets, molds and sets caught fire. When it was time to start working on a second film, “we had to really start from scratch,” Fell said.
He explained that they “didn’t have any reference apart from the making-of book — there were no puppets or anything to refer to.”
Lord added, “We were briefly discouraged by the scale of the problem, and then we thought, ‘Well, no, it’s just like any other movie. Just get on with it.’”
The do-over allowed for greater creativity: while the first film took place primarily in a single location — a Yorkshire chicken farm — the second one has dozens of intricate and colorful sets.
“It was pretty apparent when we started reading the script, the scope and scale of the script meant that the world was much vaster than the first film,” Dubicki said.
For Lord, seeing the characters come back to life after being lost in the fire was a moving experience.
Then came the flood.
After designs were rendered and all the puppets recreated, production of the sequel was on track — until the warehouse where the production team was storing all the characters and sets, as well as filming the movie, flooded.
“The roof buckled in the heat of the hot summer and then it just started raining like mad for three days,” Fell explained. “The whole studio started leaking, like, not just a little bit, like a lot.”
The team ended up engineering a system of funnels from the ceiling and bringing the water away from the sets. Fell likened it to Willy Wonka’s factory.
On top of that? The pandemic.
Preproduction began in the early months of 2020, but like everything else, it came to a screeching halt as the pandemic shut down regular life.
When the crew started working again, the necessary Covid-19 precautions significantly slowed down the process.
“Stop-motion animation is a very collaborative business — it’s about people being together in the same place, discussing, making group decisions, looking through the camera, choosing the building, designing, planning camera moves,” Lord noted. “In Covid, you couldn’t do that. You had to bring everyone on the set one at a time.”
Dubicki added, “You had to be really mindful of bringing people together at various points that were integral to making it move forward.”
It turns out that not only did staff members have to quarantine if someone tested positive or felt sick — the clay characters did as well.
Crew members “hold and touch and move the puppet with their hands, so by the time they were finished their shot, the chicken was then considered to be potentially contaminated and someone had to come in with gloves and a mask and take the chicken to the quarantine area,” Fell explained.
“There were shelves in a tent with a U.V. light where Babs would be put on the shelf for 10 days before anybody could touch her again,” he added, referring to Ginger’s knitting compadre.
“Weather, wind, pestilence, plagues — we survived it all,” Fell said with a laugh, and joked, “Next one’s coming out in 2050.”
