NEARLY a quarter of a century after its release, Chicken Run is still the biggest stop-motion animated movie to date.
But when its sequel finally takes flight this weekend, the original’s two star lead voices won’t be heard.
Neither Mel Gibson, as the daring rooster Rocky, nor Julia Sawalha, as chicken heroine Ginger, were asked to be in Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget.
The film’s British Oscar-nominated director, Sam Fell, insists that Mel, who was accused of anti-Semitic comments in 2006, was not left out for political reasons.
In 2020 Julia was reported as being “furious and devastated” at not being chosen for the new film because she “sounded too old”.
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Instead, Ginger is now voiced by Thandie Newton — who at 51 is four years younger than Julia.
Mel Gibson’s role is now played by American actor Zachary Levi.
The Sun was given an exclusive tour of Chicken Run maker Aardman Animations’ Bristol studio, where we spoke to Sam and Aardman founder Peter Lord during the making of the new film, a co-production with Netflix.
The new cast also includes young British talent Bella Ramsey, from The Last Of Us and Time, as Rocky and Ginger’s fearless daughter Molly.
Romesh Ranganathan takes over from Timothy Spall as Nick the rat, while Daniel Mays has replaced Phil Daniels as Nick’s sidekick Fetcher.
But the much-loved Imelda Staunton from The Crown is back as Bunty, Jane Horrocks returns as Babs and Miranda Richardson is the evil Mrs Tweedy once more.
Sam, whose previous credits include ParaNorman and Flushed Away, defended axing Julia and Mel, telling The Sun: “I thought about recasting the whole thing, or at least considering each role.
“The story has changed as well. I loved the first movie but I want to make a film for now.”
The much-anticipated sequel has overcome some serious hurdles since it began production more than three years ago, including a pause for the Covid lockdown.
The modelling-clay characters and elaborate sets had to be made from scratch because all but three of the originals were destroyed in a warehouse fire 18 years ago.
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Then a massive leak in the studio roof wrecked some other sets.
They have also struggled to get hold of essential materials.
Their last supplier of the Plasticine they used to sculpt the heads ended production and Aardman bought the last batch.
During the pandemic they scoured the country for the felt used for making sets, as it proved almost impossible to find.
To get the work done, Sam worked long hours daily during the three-year shoot — having previously spent three years planning the job and getting the script right.
He joked: “I am more or less half chicken at this point.”
Only when you visit the studio do you appreciate how painstaking and meticulous the work is. While most animated movies rely on computer-generated images, Aardman sticks to good old-fashioned craftsmanship.
The company’s Plasticine perfectionists hand-painted more than 150,000 feathers, while 800 chicken wings were made.
In the film’s opening sequence fans will see Chicken Island, which the chickens have made their home after escaping slaughter on Tweedy’s farm in the first film.
The 40-second shot took 18 weeks to make and the set was a couple of years in work hours.
Sam said: “You might get a bumper day when we get 12 seconds of action. That’s between 30 animators on different sets.”
It is reassuringly low tech, with icing sugar sprayed on the models, which are mainly made of silicone these days, to make them less shiny.
Road surfaces are made out of crushed walnut shells and the soil texture comes from the leaves that have fallen from the leylandii tree outside the studio.
The films’ great British humour is even reflected in notices on the studio walls, with information such as “nice two metre, two metre nice” in a nod to a Bruce Forsyth catchphrase.
The voice cast record their parts before filming begins, then the animators have to move the chickens’ Plasticine beaks to fit.
Each tiny movement is shot on a digital camera, and often just one second of action is shot per day.
When non-binary Bella Ramsey was picked for the key role of Molly they were virtually unknown.
But the 20-year-old actor is now a star, having wowed critics as Ellie in zombie drama The Last Of Us.
Bella, who previously starred in the BBC kids’ series The Worst Witch, is on the side of the chickens, both on screen and off.
In the film her character must save a feathered pal from the clutches of Tweedy’s Funland nugget factory.
And Bella revealed: “I grew up pescatarian, so I’ve never had a chicken. I’ve never had meat.”
The Bristol team were not turned off eating chicken, it was still served in the Aardman canteen.
Bella said that voicing a character for an animated movie is not like other acting, because the actors really need to exaggerate the part.
They added: “The faces that you pull, it must look so ridiculous, contorting your face and your body in a way that makes it sound like you’re jumping on a trampoline or swinging on a rope.”
In many ways the biggest surprise about Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget, which streams from December 15, is that it took so long to appear.
The first film made £180million at the box office worldwide in 2000, prompting Jeffrey Katzenberg, boss of Aardman’s then partner DreamWorks Animation, to immediately ask for a sequel.
But Peter, who founded Aardman with his old school classmate David Sproxton in 1972, said: “We didn’t think about the sequel because we were so exhausted by the first one.”
Over the years Peter and Nick Park, the co-directors of the first Chicken Run, discussed potential script ideas without finding the right one.
The 2005 warehouse fire had left them with only three characters to work with, and Peter said: “Our assets were cooked. That also slowed us down. There was almost nothing left from the original movie.”
Then they had a sound idea for a plot — that rather than break out of the farm in the style of The Great Escape, like the chickens did in the first film, this time they should break in.
Dawn Of The Nugget became a heist movie with elements of Bond and Mission: Impossible.
Like the first film, we see how strong women can be in a crisis, before such ideas went mainstream.
Sam said: “The first film was a very strong female-led film and maybe the world has caught up with the first film.
“But I have never thought, ‘Let’s design the film for the culture of now’.
“We started off designing a father-and-son film, but it wasn’t working, then we realised Ginger was such a strong character and it all fell into place and we gave her a daughter.”
Aardman remains a quirky British one-off, pluckily taking on the big studios.
Rather than selling up to foreign investors in a multi-million deal, Peter and David had a better idea.
Peter said: “The conventional thing is to sell to a rich corporation, but we thought, ‘We won’t do that, we’ll sell it to the staff’.”
And making the staff feel part of a family comes over in this very homespun, peculiarly British film.
Another Wallace and Gromit movie will be out next year, so although this production line of screen classics may be very slow, fortunately there is no sign of it stopping any time soon.
- Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget is in selected cinemas now and on Netflix from December 15.
