Chicken Run 2: Dawn of the Nugget promises to be one of the best Netflix releases of the festive period and we can't wait to find out what Ginger and her feathery friends are up to next.
A sequel to the hit 2000 stop-motion animated film Chicken Run, the new film sees Ginger and Rocky hatch a little girl called Molly, while back at Mrs Tweedy's farm, the whole of chicken-kind faces a new and terrible threat. For Ginger and her team, even if it means putting their hard-won freedom at risk — this time, they’re breaking in!
Here are 15 fun facts you almost certainly never knew about the Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, which features the voices of Thandiwe Newton, Bella Ramsey and Daniel Mays...
Chicken Run 2: Dawn of the Nugget — 15 fas-hen-ating facts
1. Aardman created a unique additional studio in Bristol to scale up to make movies back in 1997 and Chicken Run was the first film ever produced there. The sequel was also shot in the very same space!
2. Nick Park made a small voice cameo in the original Chicken Run, performing the clucks Mr Tweedy hears when he shines his torch on a teapot the chickens have disguised as a hen.
3. Factoring in alternative scenes and changes, more than 100,000 storyboards were created during the course of the production.
4. The Aardman crew working on Dawn of the Nugget totalled around 350 people, while the production comprised 45 units at its peak.
5. The film contains around 1,400 shots in total, only 28 of which are fully computer generated. The longest shot is the opening pan across Chicken Island, which is 784 frames, or 32.67 seconds. It took 80 working days to shoot the animation.
6. On the first Chicken Run, it didn’t matter when the chicken puppets’ feet became dirty, as they were all on a farm. However, when shooting the Fun-Land scenes in Dawn of the Nugget, director Sam Fell pointed out that their feet would not be dirty in this artificial environment, so they all had to be carefully cleaned.
7. To prevent the chicken puppets from having too much of a sheen on camera, each one had finely sifted icing sugar puffed onto its surface, creating an even matte effect.
8. More than 800 chicken wings were made for the production, while over 150,000 feathers had to be hand painted. Most puppets have a set of 14 mouths, but Molly had the largest mouth set, of 24. With 16 Molly puppets made in total, this meant there were 384 Molly mouths created for Dawn of the Nugget.
9. Crushed walnut shells were used to create road surfaces in the film, while the soil texture on the chicken village set was made from recycled fallen leaves from a leylandii tree outside the studio.
10. The popcorn silo sequence required 75kg of popcorn kernels — equivalent to the weight of 25 real chickens.
11. A total of 119 sets were built for the production, along with 130 animatable props, including a corn conveyor and a windmill.
12. The prop created for the “Eye Pad” gag includes the names of real Aardman facilities crew members.
13. The numbers on the collars worn by some of the characters have special significance. The ‘Chosen Chicken’ has “314”, as 3.14 is the value of pi (pie... geddit?). Frizzle’s collar has “505” which represents “SOS”. And Ginger’s collar has “983”: 9 for chronological storytelling, and “83” representing International Women’s Day (8 March).
14. If you look closely during the film’s final shot, you will spot a significant Easter egg: an imposter chicken, in the form of the nefarious penguin Feathers McGraw, from the second Wallace & Gromit adventure, The Wrong Trousers.
15. Harry Gregson-Williams has scored more Aardman movies than any other composer: Chicken Run (2000), Flushed Away (2006), Arthur Christmas (2011), Early Man (2018) and Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023).
Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget launches worldwide on Netflix on Friday, December 15 2023.
