Chicken Run 2: “It didn’t have to be just a James Bond pastiche” (interview)

Twenty-three years after the first part, the chickens of Chicken Run return to Netflix with The Nuggets Menace. In June, at the Annecy festival, director Sam Fell and producer Leyla Hobart told us the secrets of this unexpected sequel.

First: Under what circumstances did you find yourself involved in this sequel that no one was expecting?
Sam Fell : It was six years ago, I met Peter Lord (director, animator, screenwriter and co-founder of the Aardman studio) at a party in London. We hadn’t worked together in a long time. He suggested that we both redo something and invited me to come see what they were working on. And there were some great things, but above all new potential Chicken Run ! All I could see was that. The first is more than a film in my eyes, it is something that has settled into the collective unconscious. And I felt like it needed to be followed up.

Leyla Hobart : And me as soon as I learned that Chicken Run 2 was a possibility, I got involved (Laughter.) Aardman was working on a lot of very exciting things, but this film had to be very special.

SF : Peter Lord and Aardman definitely didn’t want to remake the first Chicken Run, there was a desire to evolve, to move towards a new chapter. And to adopt another point of view with new people at the helm. It took us six years, but we did it!

It took 23 years to Chicken Run 2 can finally see the light of day…
SF : Yeah, better late than never! (Laughter.)

But do you understand why it took so long, when the first one is the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time?
SF : Quite simply because you can’t show up with a bunch of Chicken Run which is not up to par. That sort of thing takes time.

L.H. : Obviously, everyone has been asking for a sequel for years. And of course they were thinking about it! Every two years or so, Aardman does a big brainstorm, but I don’t think anyone had yet found a way to make this sequel with the studio’s quality standards. The proposals were clearly not good enough.

SF : And then one day, we cracked the code. The central idea quickly boiled down to a concept: the first was an escape film, this one was going to be a heist film. Images of chickens in robbery mode with gadgets immediately come to mind (Laughter.) There is something deeply comical about it, but it also defines an entire universe. And we added a very 60s science fiction cliché around brainwashing – at the time, spy cinema was obsessed with that! Except that it didn’t have to be simply a pastiche of James Bondof Impossible mission or thrillers eurospy as Danger: Diabolik! Or Commissioner X tracks down the green dogs. There is also a little Truman Show and Wizard of Oz. In fact, we were looking for the right balance between emotion and Saturday night popcorn entertainment.

And how do we find this “golden mean”?
SF : Oh! Easier said than done. The key to making the story resonate was to push Ginger’s character to reevaluate her comfort, to force her to question what freedom is. This is what guided us throughout the creation of the film. That, and not shying away from real issues, questions of life and death. In the first Chicken Run, they actually killed a chicken, the kind of thing you never see in an animated film! Usually we talk about it, but we don’t show it. We therefore had to live up to this heritage. Once you have the darkness installed, then you can allow yourself to be funny.

From the outside, stop-motion seems like torture to perform. It is a technique that requires infinite patience. Why hold on to it?
SF : Because it’s timeless. The images you get with stop-motion don’t age. If you rewatch the first Chicken Run, it absolutely does not look outdated. On the contrary ! And I’m sure it will still be the same in 100 years. New technologies do not necessarily make better or more beautiful films. There’s something about the handwork of stop-motion that you can feel the human touch. It’s very concrete. However, in the late 90s, when Aardman was Chicken Run, Toy Story had already been out for 5 years. We said to ourselves: “ Damn, we’re finished. We’re going to have to learn how to use computers. » And finally no, we are still here, working the old way. Although I observe the development of artificial intelligence which makes it possible to produce incredible images effortlessly, I deeply believe that the human aspect is more important than ever.

Chicken Run 2: The Nugget Menace, by Sam Fell, with the voices (in original version) of Thandiwe Newton, Bella Ramsey, Zachary Levi… Available on Netflix on December 15. Duration: 1 hour 41 minutes.