‘Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget’ and ‘Migration’: Two Animated Features That Cry Fowl

As 2023 came to a close, a pair of animated movies — Aardman and Netflix’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget and Illumination/Universal’s Migration — delivered stories featuring carefully designed chickens and mallards, respectively, that leaned into simplicity to be expressive.

Dawn of the Nugget is the sequel to famed British animation studio Aardman’s 2000 stop-motion hit Chicken Run, which was directed by studio co-founder Peter Lord and four-time Academy Award winner and Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park, who designed the original flock. “He came up with this aesthetic, which is very simple. And if you look at Wallace & Gromit and then look at the chickens, they have this in common. They’re not very mobile. The chickens are kind of like bottle shapes with arms and legs,” says Lord. “Then they have this quite exaggerated mouth. Nick came up with this idea that lip sync was best served by being very strong and exaggerated and big. The combined effect of the goggling eyes in the middle of the head and the big wide mouth, it makes you laugh.”

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Lord, who executive produced Dawn of the Nugget, and director Sam Fell (Oscar-nominated for Paranorman), found that this recipe not only supported the humor but allowed the puppets to be very expressive for more dramatic moments. In the sequel, the story again focuses on the strong-willed Ginger, who with rooster Rocky now has an equally strong-minded daughter, Molly. There were many new characters to design, including Molly, who is undeniably Ginger’s daughter in appearance but not just a copy. “I wanted her to have great energy and athleticism,” says Fell. “That’s what kids are like. I gave her longer legs than most chickens.” They also made subtle changes such as her coloring, which is closer to that of Rocky.

Migration features a family of mallards and is directed by French cartoonist and filmmaker Benjamin Renner (he received an Oscar nomination for the 2012 French animated feature Ernest & Celestine), who began with a focus on a naturalistic look. “At some point we did a little research. We decided to forget about naturalism and went back to the minimalism,” Renner explains. “I have a technique when I’m a bit lost, where I use a very minimalistic way of drawing, constraining myself to draw a character with just free lines or very quickly within five seconds, so I can really get the essence of a character.”

For the daughter, Gwen, for instance, Renner used one drop of watercolor and let it dry, and then added eyes and feet — “just to have this idea of a character that was a little ball of emotion that can’t express herself, a bit shy. We kept this idea of this little ball of fluff that we kept designing.” He notes that often a tendency is to make the character very cute, “but remember your little sisters and little brothers, they [can be] really annoying. I asked to give her big grand eyes with pupils in the middle so she could be funny as well.”

This story first appeared in the Jan. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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