ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget director Sam Fell about what makes the Chicken Run sequel differ from the beloved original. The film debuts on Netflix on December 15, 2023.
“Having pulled off a death-defying escape from Tweedy’s farm, Ginger has finally found her dream — a peaceful island sanctuary for the whole flock, far from the dangers of the human world. When she and Rocky hatch a little girl called Molly, Ginger’s happy ending seems complete. But back on the mainland the whole of chicken-kind faces a new and terrible threat. For Ginger and her team, even if it means putting their own hard-won freedom at risk — this time, they’re breaking in!”
Tyler Treese: I really enjoyed the addition of Molly. It’s such a fresh dynamic, and the character’s wonderfully voiced by Bella Ramsey. The character is naturally naive to the world, but she wants to explore it. Can you speak to focusing the story on her wanting to go outside the island, which is all she’s really known?
Sam Fell: I suppose I identified with Molly most, actually, and it was great for me as a new director to have a new character and a new point of view to latch onto. Because the first movie is very precious and very beloved, and obviously, Ginger and Rocky were the center of that movie. It was a romantic comedy. It was about this playboy, an American coming into this henhouse and this very serious British woman. Molly gave me a way in.
I mean, obviously, it’s the next chapter of Ginger’s story, and the next challenge for her is motherhood. The thing that really drove it was thinking about Ginger, actually. Because all she ever wanted was the green grass between her toes. She’s dreamed and dreamed and dreamed about that. It was her desire that drove the entire movie of the first one, and so she gets it at the end of the movie.
So we were like, well, how are we gonna challenge that? What’s her next challenge? It just seemed really a great idea to say, so she’s got freedom and here it is, and she’s made it beautiful. It’s a paradise. It’s like chicken Wakanda, right? It’s sort of safe from the world. It’s got all of the technology that chickens need. It’s hidden. She brings Molly into this world, and she says to Molly, “Here you go, Molly, here it is freedom. It’s all yours, and you can stay here forever.”
It just seemed like it would be the biggest shock for Ginger for her daughter to turn around and go, “This is not freedom for me,” and to be a freedom seeker just like Ginger, but seek it in a different way and want to go off the island. At the same time, I mean, interestingly, personally, my son was a child when I started this project, and he grew up and left home during the whole project. So I’ve kind of personal experience in watching and knowing that you have to let go as a parent, and knowing actually that kids have to go and seek their own adventure outside of the bubble.
It’s such a great evolution of the original themes. What I love about this is rather than an escape, this movie is very much a heist movie. It’s very in the vein of Mission: Impossible when it gets going. So how was it finding a fun twist on that formula? Because it would’ve been so easy to do a retread, but this is much more rewarding for fans.
Sam Fell: I mean, that was the risk, you know, because I adore the first movie, so many people do, and it’s a challenge to kind of move away from that, but I’m glad we did. The first movie had this logline that kind of unlocked it. It was “The Great Escape with chickens.” That was the summary of that, and it unlocked.
So, with this movie, we were always looking for something like that to unlock this. To kind of set it off again. It was, “This time, they’re breaking in,” and as soon as someone said that, it just instantly conjured up all these images of the chickens with clever props, funny sort of visual humor, and all the ingenuity that goes into a Mission: Impossible action sequence, but done with chickens and pencils and bottles and domestic objects. Just that one line simply made us smile, you know?
