PicoBlog

We don’t often get sequels after 20 or more years, and yet here is “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” appearing on Netflix December 15. That’s right in time for winter in parts of the northern hemisphere, which is when parents often need to placate their kids.

The movie works as a brief entertainment-escape, vicariously for us and yet literally for the movie’s characters, as the chickens once again have to run away from something elaborately dangerous.

We saw them last in 2000’s “Chicken Run,” one of several good-to-great stop-motion animation movies that the British studio Aardman Animations has made in the last four decades. In that movie, they had to escape a family farm, because the farmers were changing their business from egg to chicken-meat sales.

The chickens, threatened as they were with being raised plumply and turned into nice tasty protein, therefore run.

The plot of the original “Chicken Run” features the rooster Rocky, an ambitious individualist adventurer voiced by Mel Gibson, who had to learn to not be so selfish and instead help the fellow members of his species. That meant rescuing everybody and leaving the farm, which was depicted as a WW2 prison-camp. “Chicken Run” therefore was delightfully modeled after the classic movie “The Great Escape.”

That worked. My family has watched the movie half a dozen times, often just as a comfort movie that provides delight and laughs.

Because chickens.

“Chicken Run 2” more or less repeats everything from the first movie. This is fine but not ambitious enough for film art. It’s the same taste as its original, just less juicy and less crispy in my view.

The plot begins with typical static-world of kids’ movie fare. The chickens dwell in an island utopia, pictured above, the place they escape to after the first movie.

There, as these kids movies go, the new generation of chickens wishes to see what’s beyond the island. Moms and dads, knowing the horrors of hungry humans outside their domain, say “no.” Nevertheless the kids escape, obviously to create plot dynamics.

The main kid is Molly, the daughter of Rocky and Ginger, both heroes of the original movie. These adult chickens flash back to the horrors of the old farm regularly. Meanwhile their daughter, not having that experience, flies the island coop.

While the chickens chase after her, she stumbles into the old Funlands Farm. First seeing the advertisement for it, she’s drawn into its allurements. Only the farm, as it turns out, has been transformed into something that looks like a James-Bond villain bunker.

So the Funland Farms of the first movie is now a movie-Nazi fortress, and there they are slaughtering chickens by the hundreds. The farmers’ new plan is to make the first chicken nuggets and earn gazillions in revenue.

Yet, before the inevitable chicken slaughter inside, they first seduce the chickens with a hyperreal plastic wonderland from the 1960s. Molly is amazed by it.

From here, the plot is straightforward. The adult chickens, including Ginger and Rocky, have to rescue Molly. That means infiltrating the fortress, rescuing everyone, and getting the heck out of there.

Instead of “The Great Escape,” the movie is modeled on WW2 fare such as “Where Eagles Dare,” with James Bond and Mission: Impossible thrown in as heavy influences. To me, that took away from the quaintness of the English farm of the original film. The sets are bigger here, the action is nonstop, but the nonsensical charm of stop-motion chickens gets lost somewhat in incessant action-adventure.

The movie is indeed missing Mel Gibson. His husky voice recalled all the selfish solo characters he’s played, including Mad Max. Rocky is now voiced by Zachary Levi, a choice that has no allure and no chemistry with the rest of the British-voiced cast. The less of him, the better.

By the 15-minute mark, you know what’s going to happen: the chickens will repeat, in funny ways, the fortress-infiltration plots of movies past.

I think we have to judge art by its pleasant surprises and novel variations, and I’m not sure this movie has any. The plastic wonderland, where they fatten up the chickens and effectively brainwash them, before turning them into nuggets, is a nice touch. Repeating the main villain of the original does nothing much for me: she’s now a James-Bond arch-villainess, doing arch-villainess things.

That’s the problem with non-stop action: it often just robs a film of its nuancefulness. A lot more could’ve been done with this movie’s thematic interests. The younger chicken generation, not understanding the prison-camp horrors of their parents, repeat in worse ways the doom-filled lives of the older generation. Only here, they are seduced by hyperreal fantasies, part Pleasure Island from “Pinocchio” and part “The Truman Show.”

That setup has strong social critique possibilities, but those are laid aside to satisfy the basic rescue-mission plot goals. Why can’t we have both?

What “Chicken Run 2” offers up is more fast-food than sumptuous feast, which has its place I suppose, in limited quantities. I, however, would rather dine well all the time.

Note: the movie’s runtime is listed at a lengthy 101 minutes for a stop-motion picture, yet it’s a façade. That’s because there are 15 minutes of end-credits! That means we are sneaking close to Monty-Python territory, when the credits will run whenever they want to, lasting longer than the actual movie.

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