Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023) 
Director: Sam Fell
Screenwriters: Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell, Rachel Tunnard
Starring: Bella Ramsey, Thandiwe Newton, Zachary Levi, Imelda Staunton, Lynn Ferguson, David Bradley, Jane Horrocks, Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, Josie Sedgwick-Jones, Peter Serafinowicz, Nick Mohammed, Miranda Richardson

On the surface, the original Chicken Run (2000) was a fantastic children’s movie and a feat for animated films. It was 90 minutes of pure feathery fun and righteous chicken anger. The movie had impeccable comedic timing akin to Aardman Studio’s other works like Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. These movies have a beating heart and soul that has stuck with children and adults alike because of their ability to wrap us in the warm hug of their respective worlds. And still, beneath it all lies something even deeper, something profound. For many millennials and cuspers, Chicken Run was an introduction to Marxism and revolution itself. 

As rebel chicken, Ginger (played by Julia Sawalha in 2000) rallies the hens against tyrannical farmers, she dares them to imagine a world governed only by their own will. “Don’t you get it?” she clucks, “There’s no morning headcount, no dogs, no farmers, no coops and keys, and no fences.” It’s a powerful cry for revolution – a call to rise up against injustice, no matter the cost. Though the film is filled with slapstick humor, its demand to rage against oppression transcends the children’s animation genre, cementing it as a powerful allegory for World War II and universal demands for human (and chicken) rights. 

Needless to say, the sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, was highly anticipated by audiences and critics. Nearly 20 years after the original, the follow-up had big shoes to fill. What lessons would the new Chicken Run teach us? Perhaps something about the rise of fascism? Environmentalism? Maybe it would lead us to the answers we’ve all been searching for in these tumultuous times? Unfortunately, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget takes more of a formulaic follow-up approach than broaching anything remotely groundbreaking. 

In this rendition, Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) and Rocky (Zachary Levi, replacing Mel Gibson) return, now living in an idyllic, poultry utopia. Though they are happy in their new homes, they are closed off from the rest of society. Their daughter, Molly (Bella Ramsey), takes after her mother and dreams of life bigger than their confined existence on the island. Soon, Molly escapes to the mainland and finds herself trapped in a chicken factory called Fun-Land Farm. Now, it’s up to the other chickens to break into the factory, a subversion from the previous film’s breakout. 

Dawn of the Nugget isn’t completely without charm. The animation is beautiful and bright, stepping away from the original film’s muted color palate to favor a more vibrant chicken paradise. Fun-Land Farm is garishly bright, showcasing the false promises of the deceptively named poultry plant. Even the heist-like stunts feel higher stakes and more elaborate. There are more hijinks, slipping, falling, and scrambling than ever. 

Though the scale feels dialled up to 11, the film is missing its original creativity and simplistic but resilient spirit that made it an instant classic. Dawn of the Nugget is much more concerned with simple tropes like breaking away from tradition and marching to the beat of your own drum than anything revolutionary. Its simple premise and resistance to taking risks – both thematically and comedically – make the 101-minute run feel like a bit of a slog. 

It’s a lot to ask of a film – to be both a succinct manifesto about the state of modern politics and revolutionary movements and a hokey comedy about chickens falling on their heads – but it has been done before. Perhaps the reason Dawn of the Nugget felt so flat is the enormous shadow its predecessor casts upon the film. And, in the 20 years in between the first and second editions of Ginger and Rocky’s story, we’ve had plenty of time to fill in the gaps on our own. Dawn of the Nugget is a fine movie to turn on for the kids on a Saturday afternoon, but turn on Chicken Run (2000) and you might just have a revolution on your hands. 

Score: 12/24

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The films that have been selected are, I believe, the peak of cinematic mastery. They span nearly the length of cinema’s existence, and are deliberately chosen to reflect a wide range of genres, countries, and times. One major reason for this is to force myself to list films that are not exclusively 1980s horror movies, which I could quite easily do. The second is because that list would be wrong, as although they could be peak horror, some would undoubtedly be worse than films outside the genre.

Therefore, for better or for worse, at the time of writing, listed from oldest to youngest and with no system of ranking, here are my picks for the 10 Best Films of All Time.

Follow me on X (Twitter) – @KJudgeMental

10. La Voyage dans la Lune (1902)

It is impossible to understate how important this film was.

From the grandfather of special effects, Georges Méliès, come fifteen minutes of sheer adventure, adapting the Jules Verne novels “From the Earth to the Moon”, and “Around the Sun”, along with H. G. Wells’ “First Men on the Moon”, it is a film which pushed the limits of the medium, bringing thrills beyond the stars to the screen for all to see.

Hand-painted frame by frame to add a splash of colour, employing all of Méliès’ stage magic knowhow, it still has the power to captivate to this day, despite being created only seven years after the Lumiere brothers demonstrated their kinematograph at the 1895 December World Fair. The rocket splatting into the eye of the moon is an image almost everyone in the world has seen, despite rarely knowing where it comes from.

It is fun and joyous and, thanks to restoration work and new scores, able to keep its legacy going over 120 years later. Not a single cast or crew member from this film is alive today, yet A Trip to the Moon lives on.

9. Psycho (1960)

We could argue over Hitchcock’s best film for decades. Indeed, many have done, and we still never will agree. Vertigo famously dethroned Citizen Kane in Sight and Sound magazine as the best film ever in 2011, a title the Welles film had held for many decades. Yet Psycho takes my vote for numerous reasons.

Not only is its story iconic – the shower scene one of the greatest sequences in cinema history – and its production history something of legend, but it is supreme mastery of cinematic craftsmanship.

Every shot is glorious, every moment timed to perfection. Suspense is at an all-time high, mystery around every corner. Yet perhaps what is most startling is its efficiency, Hitchcock’s most underappreciated skill. If a scene required 50 cuts, he’d have it. If it required a simple shot/reverse shot with the most subtle of powerful, timed camera cuts to a tighter or a lower angle (see the dinner between Marion and Norman), he did it. It is an exercise in extreme precision, in efficiency of storytelling, and it cuts deeper than almost any other film.

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What follows in this edition of Ranked is The Film Magazine’s ranking from worst to best of every Best Animated Feature Oscar winner, analysing the merits of each in terms of artistic achievement, importance to the medium, societal relevance and lasting impression, plus a few mentions of the braver animated efforts from each year that for various reasons missed out on the big prize. These are the Best Animated Feature Oscar Winners Ranked.

Follow @thefilmagazine on Twitter.

21. Happy Feet (2006)

A tone-deaf juvenile penguin discovers he has a very different talent to the rest of his musical colony: he’s really gifted at tap-dancing.

Amazingly George Miller, the man behind every Mad Max movie and the screenplay for Babe also directed this bouncy Antarctic jukebox musical. It’s all very detailed and visually appealing, having more in common with actual nature documentaries than most other animated films, but the story is pretty first-base and the songs are a real mixed bag. 

20. Toy Story 4 (2019)

Toy Story 4 Review

Woody, Buzz and the gang leave their new home to go on a road trip in order to help handmade toy Forky get over his identity crisis.

There aren’t many fourth movies in a franchise of higher quality, but Toy Story 4 had the misfortune of being compared to the near-perfect trilogy that preceded it. How and why would you try and follow that? But follow it they did, and it’s a decent effort with good (sometimes surprisingly dark) gags and all the usual heart you’ve come to expect from this series. 

19. Shrek (2001)

A solitary ogre and a tag-along talking donkey reluctantly go on a quest to rescue a princess in exchange for Shrek being left in peace in his swamp.

Shrek receives a lot of flak for moving animation away from the magical escapism of Disney to the more polished, snarky fare that dominates today, but it was absolutely revolutionary in its way. Every fantasy parody from the past two decades has borrowed something from its unique selling point and each of its characters, and it must be praised for its earnest message of self-acceptance (before it was recycled for the sequels) and its witty visuals (which still hold up). 

18. Brave (2012)

A Scottish princess shames her clan by breaking with marriage traditions and goes to a witch for a spell to change her fate, catastrophically changing the lives of her loved ones in the process.

One of Pixar’s less successful films still has a winning protagonist in Merida (sparkily voiced by Kelly Macdonald) and a refreshing (and far too unusually explored) dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship at its heart. The actual story structure is conventional and wobbles perilously close to a Disney Renaissance re-tread, but it’s still an emotionally honest and lively affair. 

Three stop-motion animated features, Laika’s Paranorman, Tim Burton’s Frankeneenie and Aardman’s The Pirates! were passed over in favour of Pixar this year.

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Robin Robin (2021)
Directors: Daniel Ojari, Michael Please
Screenwriters: Daniel Ojari, Michael Please, Sam Morrison
Starring: Bronte Carmichael, Richard E. Grant, Gillian Anderson, Adeel Akhtar, Amira Macey-Michael

Aardman Animation are world-renowned for offering some of the most imaginative and critically acclaimed stop motion animated films ever made. Their repertoire in the feature length realm includes 8 BAFTA Film Award nominations and 4 Oscar nominations (1 win), the likes of Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit branding their unique stylings into the annals of cinema history. It is the production house’s work in short film that has established its legacy however, decades of Christmastime Wallace and Gromit showings on British television solidifying Aardman as a quintessential part of many a Briton’s favourite time of year. In Robin Robin, the animation group returns to the kind of story that earned them such a beloved place in the hearts of millions: a wholly British telling of festive love and acceptance that shuns big budget animation’s sarcastic attitudes to offer something altogether more wholesome. Aardman are once again leading the world in their respective industry.

Bronte Carmichael’s Robin is a robin who is adopted by a group of mice when she accidentally falls from her nest whilst still in her egg. As she grows, she struggles to adapt to the methods of her mouse family, her uncontrollable singing and inability to walk as quietly as her loved ones causing her family to miss out on pinching some crumbs from a number of families (“who-mans”) in housing close to where the mice live. Upon meeting a trinket-collecting magpie with an injured wing (Richard E. Grant), she decides to take the who-mans’ Christmas star and make a wish all her own, but a nasty cat (voiced by Gillian Anderson) stands in her way.

A robin red breast is, reportedly, the UK’s favourite bird. Their likeness is printed on seasonal greetings cards, their presence roundly accepted as part of the magic of the festive season. Magpies, by contrast, are often vilified as subjects of a well-known rhyme – “one for sorrow, two for joy” – but just as widely knowable to the British public. Mice and cats hold more universal appeal, but their presences in British culture have been the stuff of legend for millennia, some cities in the UK having at one time branded their buildings with statues of cats as a part of a superstitious ritual the people believed protected them from evil spirits. Robin Robin is constructed purposefully to bring light to these aspects of British culture, to offer a celebration of all these quirks the UK holds but rarely (more rarely than ever) seems to be able to present in any kind of far-reaching manner.

Here, the robin in question is beautifully animated (when are Aardman Animations not?), her bauble-like roundness sitting atop two spindly stick legs, the felt that makes up her body smushed around the top of her head to make two false mouse ears. The magpie, in contrast, is long-limbed, his beak angular, his palace of coins, bottle tops and shoes like something from an early German Expressionism film (ie, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari). The who-man houses are perhaps where the most shortcuts have been taken, the sumptuously detailed practical designs replaced in moments by CG renders, but make no mistake that this is as timeless as any Aardman animation and is of a style that now feels wholly more Christmassy than just about anything else.

The voice work on offer in this short film speaks to the reputation this monumentally important animation house has within the film industry. Bronte Carmichael is reliably adorable and very British in her offering as the Robin stumbling through uncomfortable truths on her way to discovering her own beauty, while BAFTA Best Actor nominee (2022) Adeel Akhtar (Ali & Ava) speaks in soft tones and at a slower pace than the rest of the cast, offering perhaps more to his character of the loving father figure mouse than any other character does. Even Richard E. Grant (Oscar and BAFTA-nominated for his role in Can You Ever Forgive Me?), known for his over-the-top antics, is softer here, toned down to an extent, as the Magpie. This proves important in juxtaposing the performance of Gillian Anderson as the cat, the former ‘X Files’ star’s wispy tones and slow delivery presenting a villainous feline as menacing and unmissable as any since Scar in The Lion King (1994).

With Robin Robin Aardman Animation have once again proven why their reputation is as it is, the layers of detail not only in the animation but in the writing and characterisation being of the highest quality. In this short release, available worldwide via Netflix, Aardman have offered another Christmas classic; a timeless stop motion film that shall act as both repeatable Christmas viewing for years to come and as an important snapshot of the better parts of British film and culture. Just as importantly, Aardman have once again worked to celebrate film in the short form, bringing attention to a medium that so often goes under the radar, offering work that is incomparable at any length.

24/24

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A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019)
Directors: Richard Phelan, Will Becher
Screenwriters: Mark Burton, Jon Brown
Starring: Justin Fletcher, John Sparkes, Amalia Vitale, Chris Morrell

Chicken Run was released twenty one years ago this year. It marked Aardman Animation’s first foray into the world of feature filmmaking and was an instant classic, proving that the British producers could hang with even the biggest and best animation studios such as Pixar, Disney and Dreamworks. Despite Aardman proving their abilities to create classics such as Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the animation group have struggled over the past decade to match the calibre of such early films, consistently making good films but never quite reaching the heights that they once reached.

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon marks the second feature film of the beloved Aardman character Shaun the Sheep. Following on from the relatively successful first film Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015), and being the recipient of an Oscar nomination for Animated Feature in 2021, it may seem from the outside like Farmageddon is the film to kick-start the Aardman renaissance. The truth is, however, less optimistic. 

Farmageddon follows the titular Shaun the Sheep as he attempts to return Lu-La, an alien who has crash-landed near Mossy Bottom Farm, back to her ship. All the while The Ministry for Alien Detection attempts to capture Shaun’s new alien friend.

The movie is jam-packed with references to past Aardman projects as well as to the science fiction genre, creating a rather fun world that by its very nature appeals to children but also works hard to appeal to older fans of the studio, maintaining engagement through references and homages to the likes of ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Red Dwarf’ and Back to the Future.

That being said, Farmageddon is very much aimed at children. Whereas some of the animation house’s best films have simply been suitable for children, mostly being lauded for appealing to audiences of all ages, Farmageddon feels as though it is directly aimed at kids, for better and for worse. It’s a film very low on dialogue, making it accessible to audiences across nations, age limitations and language barriers, but this choice does take away from a lot of Aardman’s appeal as a witty and sarcastic animation studio, reducing the potential of the film. More than clever, it seems lazy… at least relative to their years long projects in the early days.

Whereas Aardman’s favourite canine, Gromit, has more character than most of the company’s other characters despite his lack of speech, Shaun the Sheep does not follow suit. Shaun is mischievous and caring, but finding much personality or depth beyond this is difficult. The same issue arises with Lu-La, and particularly the film’s ensemble of minor characters.

This one dimensional treatment of the characters translates into the story itself. Despite heavy similarities between the story of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, Farmageddon spreads the story as thinly as possible, keeping in all of the fun and taking out much of its emotional impact. Whereas Chicken Run expanded upon the films it was parodying by creating something original out of homage, Farmageddon is much more difficult to enjoy on its own. 

Many of the jokes completely fail to land in Farmageddon, and in many ways it is reductive (especially for an animation house as reputable as Aardman), but it does feature some of the very best animation the studio have put together so far and there is fun to be had.

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon doesn’t feel like an Oscar-worthy film, and perhaps it is not the one to kick-start an Aardman renaissance, but the short runtime goes by as quickly as you’d expect and it is in places irresistibly fun, so while it is a film that is too hollow to praise it is certainly too difficult to hate.

13/24

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In the wake of the announcement of another silver screen release – Chicken Run 2 (set for Netflix in 2022/23) – we’ve taken a look at the works of Aardman Animation and their spectacular feature films. Although each of these have been rated highly and have together made around $1 billion at the worldwide box office, we’ve ranked them in order of absolute brilliance, for this: Aardman Animation Movies Ranked.

Have an opinion? Let us know in the comments at the end of this article.

8. Early Man (2018)

2018 saw Aardman’s release of Early Man, another highly anticipated stop-motion production.

The film follows a tribe of primitive Stone Age valley dwellers who have to defend their land from bronze-using invaders in a football match. The creative and pertinent story was entertaining for sure, using its sweet humour and unique visuals to kept young audiences coming back for a second and third viewing. Sadly it bombed at the box office.

7. Flushed Away (2006)

The third and final collaboration between Aardman and Dreamworks, Flushed Away was the company’s first computer-animated film as opposed to their usual stop-motion style. Again, bringing a whole host of voice actors such as Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet, this production received a BAFTA nomination, and even a video game was released. Enjoyed by children and adults worldwide, Flushed Away also boasts a fantastic soundtrack.

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