BEFORE: OK, so the next film on my schedule was another film with Laurence Fishburne, "The School for Good and Evil". Only as I was going through the cast lists and re-color coding them after removing the cast of "All the Old Knives", I saw that yesterday's film shared an actor with the "Chicken Run" sequel, which I've been meaning to get to. But damn, I couldn't really get off the path I was on, which is set to take me to the end of January. Unless.... Yes, against all odds, the new "Chicken Run" movie ALSO shares an actor with "The School for Good and Evil", so I can just drop this one here, Laurence Fishburne comes back tomorrow for a third film, and this then makes two films in a row for Thandiwe Newton, who carries over instead.
This is great, because I think I've only seen ONE 2023 animated feature so far that's likely to get nominated at the Oscars, namely "Across the Spider-Verse". If I watch this one, another probably nominee, I'll double my chances of seeing the winner in that category before it wins. God knows I don't have much going on, since I haven't seen "Oppenheimer" or "Killers of the Flower Moon" or "Poor Things" or "Maestro" or even "Barbie". Nope, not "American Fiction" or "The Holdovers" either. No, my best bet is now the animated feature category, especially if I've seen two likely nominees (and one unlikely one) - but I'm sure in no hurry to watch "Elemental" or "The Boy and the Heron", so two films seen might have to be enough.
So yeah, tomorrow I'll be back on track, after this animated diversion - actually, I plan to watch the first "Chicken Run" film first, which doesn't count because I've already seen it, but it was WAY back in 2000, that's as in 23 years ago, and I only saw it once. I barely remember what happened in it, and that's kind of the sign that tells me I need to re-watch. But first, the bad news, adding this film means I'll have to cut something else from January's schedule to make it fit in the month space provided - I think I know which one I want to cut, there aren't too many choices, because that has to be a film in the middle of at least a three-film chain with the same actor.
THE PLOT: Having escaped from Tweedy's farm, Ginger has found a peaceful island sanctuary for the whole flock. But back on the mainland, the whole of chicken-kind faces a new threat, and Ginger and her team decide to break in.
AFTER: Well, I'm glad I watched "Chicken Run" again first, because I'd forgotten nearly everything about it, and it was a hilarious spoof of movies like "The Great Escape", just set in a chicken farm instead of a World War II P.O.W. camp, kind of mixed with a concentration camp for good measure. There was this giant machine that would turn the chickens into chicken pies, and all that probably had something to do with the younger generation being so full of vegetarians these days. The more militant ones probably noticed some similarity between what humans do to chickens and what the Nazis did to Jews and gypsies during the Holocaust. Frank Perdue is therefore kind of like Adolf Hitler from the chickens' P.O.V.
But in another way, I'm sorry that I re-watched "Chicken Run" again first, because I then realized how alike the two films are, and if you're going to make a sequel to a successful film you should probably make that sequel different in some way, and not just tell the same story again, 23 years later. Oh, sure, there are SOME differences, like here the chickens have to break INTO a chicken farm rather than break OUT of one, but that's a minor details. Other than that, most of the characters from the first film are back (though some of those are now voiced by different actors) and it feels like there's a new villain, only the old one from the first film eventually comes back, too, so really, what was the point of defeating her in the first film, then?
(Look, I know you're not going to get Mel Gibson to come back - I think the only reason they got him for the first film was that he'd never done an animated film before, plus also he was going through a really bad publicity period after getting caught driving drunk and calling a female police officer "Sugar Tits" - but perhaps I don't have the timeline right on that one. (I don't, that DUI incident happened 6 years after "Chicken Run" was released...))
But at its core, the sequel is essentially the same exact film as the first, and that's a problem. The animation company had 23 years to come up with some new ideas for what to do with chickens, and it looks like all that time was wasted, because they just ended up back where they
started. Rocky and Ginger do have a small child (Molly, aka the Nugget) and that child comes of age outside of a chicken farm, in and idyllic bird sanctuary, but that in itself is a problem, because to her the sanctuary and living under her parents' roof is kind of like a prison, but she never lived in REAL prison, so she doesn't really have anything to compare it to. She desperately wants freedom, without completely understanding how good her life is with her parents (This is actually a pretty good message to send out to the teens out there - living with your parents isn't so bad, not when you compare it to a concentration camp, or being raised on a farm where YOU are the source of protein.). Kids, if you think you've got it bad, it could always be worse, a lot worse. They won't find this out, of course, unless Trump gets a second term and their parents are liberal Democrats who voted for Biden.
The new chicken farm doesn't really LOOK like a chicken farm, at least, not to Molly and the other chickens. The billboard advertisement makes it look like a giant wonderland for chickens, so naturally chickens from all over start heading there to have a spectacular time. I don't think this is a thing, though, designing a chicken slaughterhouse as a theme park in order to fool the chickens. Then once the chickens get inside they're fitted with collars that are also mind-control devices, so they don't even have the mental capacity to try to escape. Looks like maybe some chicken farmers learned a few things from their experiences in the last film, right? But also, mind control of farm animals isn't really a thing in the real world, either.
So you have to make a decision for yourself, did they change the plot around enough to justify making the sequel, all this time later? The first film still exists, so today's kids could just watch that one, it still holds up, but now they also have another film that they can watch with (again, to my thinking) almost exactly the same events taking place. The changes here were just a bunch of window-dressing, but as always, your mileage may vary. I just think they could have gone in any new direction with this sequel, but they chose to largely repeat themselves, and that's a shame.
Now, to be fair, they keep bringing back the same elements in "Star Wars" films, too. How many Death Stars and/or Starkiller Bases have there been? How many times have we been back to Tatooine, which everyone refers to as a nothing-burger of a planet? Really, every film after the first one just throws in a few new elements but keeps just as many the same, so yeah, I get it, you want a sequel to feel like it's part of the same world, so you keep a lot of things the same. But then you risk not being different enough, and that becomes boring rather quickly. Still, if you change too much then you get "American Tail: Fievel Goes West" and simply nobody ever wanted that. It's a tricky thing to run a film franchise, I'm guessing.
I'm going to grade on a curve tonight, therefore, and the rating won't necessarily be for how creative the sequel was, but also reflects how much DAMN WORK goes into making one of these stop-motion films at feature length. The longest shot in this film took 80 days to shoot, and I remember del Toro talking about "Pinocchio", saying that on a good full day of work on a stop-motion film, you're lucky if you get a few usable SECONDS of animation. So there was at least five years spent on animation for this film, and I'm probably low-balling that. (EDIT: I'm wrong again, looks like they began shooting this in early 2021 and it was released in October 2023, so they got it all done in about 2 1/2 years.)
Also starring the voices of Zachary Levi (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again"), Bella Ramsey (last seen in "Resistance"), Imelda Staunton (last seen in "Nanny McPhee"), Lynn Ferguson, David Bradley (last heard in "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio"), Jane Horrocks (last heard in "Arthur Christmas"), Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays (last seen in "The Rhythm Section"), Josie Sedgwick-Davies, Peter Serafinowicz (last seen in "The Bubble"), Nick Mohammed (last seen in "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"), Miranda Richardson (last seen in "Spielberg").
RATING: 6 out of 10 Sir Eat-a-Lot restaurants
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