Nearly 24 years after the beloved children’s film blew audiences away in 2000, Ginger, Rocky and the rest of the Chicken Run crew return to screens for Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.
The announcement of a sequel after two decades stunned fans but filmmakers revealed the journey behind the scenes was far more bizarre than anyone could have imagined.
Speaking to Daily Express at the film’s headline gala at the London Film Festival, Anne King, who led the puppet team, revealed that the stop-motion puppets were actually quite high-risk during the depths of the pandemic.
She jokingly explained that the making of the puppets is “really unhygienic”, saying that some animators “even lick (the clay) to smooth them down” and with each puppet being handled by multiple creators and animators there was the potential for a superspreader event.
As a result, the stars of Chicken Run had to be quarantined as well as their human creators.
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Anne continued: “We put them under some UV cabinets, more like a chicken sunbed, to give them a bit of a blast to kill anything and leave them for a bit before we swapped over to another animator, just to make sure we were being hygienic.”
The film’s production designer, Darren Dubicki, also revealed that the streets of Bristol had a surprising influence on the Netflix blockbuster as he worked from home during the lockdowns.
He revealed with a chuckle: “I made some cardboard cutouts of the characters Rocky and Ginger at the right scale and wandered around the streets of Bristol, around its architecture so I could get a sense of the scale.
“We couldn’t get into the studio at the time so that’s the closest thing we could do to get the ball moving.”
The pandemic also offered the filmmakers ample opportunity to pour themselves into their research for the fantasy children’s film, as Darren recalled how “Chicken Island” came to be.
He revealed how he and director Sam Fell got into the mindsets of chickens to create the perfect “chicken idyll”, saying: “It was the first thing we started looking at in terms of design amidst the pandemic and lockdowns.
“I just had a lot of time to gather lots and lots of references for this world and how idyllic it was going to be, how lush, to make it feel like a paradise.
“We found that there were sculptors and artists online who make things that look like nests that people are living in, and we thought; ‘Wow it’s kind of half done for us!’.”
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is available to stream on Netflix.
