Western Animation / Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget

Spoilers from Chicken Run will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

The plot chickens...

"Last time, we broke out of a chicken farm. Well, this time... we're breaking in."

— Ginger

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is a 2023 British stop-motion comedy film by Aardman Animations and the sequel to the 2000 film Chicken Run. It is directed by Sam Fell (ParaNorman, Flushed Away) and co-written by original screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick (Smallfoot). Original cast members Jane Horrocks, Imelda Staunton, Lynn Ferguson, and Miranda Richardson reprise their roles from the first film, joined by new cast members Thandiwe Newton, Zachary Levi, Bella Ramsey, Nick Mohammad, Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, Peter Serafinowicz, and David Bradley.

Following their daring escape from Tweedy's farm, Ginger, Rocky, and the rest of the flock have found an island paradise where they can live out their days in peace, with Ginger and Rocky even having a little girl of their own. However, when a new high-tech chicken farm appears with a whole new scheme that threatens all of chicken-kind, Ginger must lead one more dangerous mission to protect her loved ones.

The film was released internationally on Netflix December 15, 2023. A screening of the film occurred October 14, at the London Film Festival.

Previews: Sneak Preview, Teaser Trailer, Trailer

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"Chickens go in, tropes come out..."

• The '60s: The decade the film is set, given how the first film was set in The '50s. The in-universe usage of the song "Summer Holiday" would place the setting at 1963 at the earliest.
• Actor Allusion: Molly, who's voiced by Bella Ramsey, is an adventurous young girl who is associated with the color blue, and has an overprotective mother. Ramsey also voiced Hilda from the eponymous show, who's similar to Molly this way.
• Actually Quite Catchy: Babs and Fetcher, the two Cloudcuckoolanders, sing "Summer Holiday" along with the other brainwashed chickens before being snapped out of it.
• Advertised Extra: Frizzle was given quite a bit of promotion in the trailers and posters, being advertised as Molly's main companion on her adventure. In the actual film, Frizzle spends most of her screentime brainwashed and doesn't contribute much, and Molly has to work alone until reuniting with her parents.
• Affectionate Nickname:
  • Rocky refers to Ginger as "Ginge" a few times (quite a step up from the belittling and sexist terms like "doll", "doll face", and "angel cakes").
  • Both Rocky and Ginger refer to Molly as "Mollypod."
  • Molly calls Nick and Fetcher "Uncle Nick" and "Uncle Fetch".
• Age-Progression Song: "My Sweet Baby" by Paloma Faith plays after the title card, during which Molly grows from infant to toddler to young child to 11-year-old.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Rocky, Nick and Fetcher spend a part of the movie looking for Molly and Ginger through Fun-Land Farms' vents.
• Ambiguous Situation: As in the first film, it is not clear if the humans notice that the chickens can talk. There are multiple scenes where the chickens talk to humans, but the humans never actually respond to anything the chickens say. The only human characters who are definitely aware the chickens are intelligent are Mrs. Tweedy, who learned her lesson from the first film, and Dr. Fry, since his whole invention relies on the fact that the chickens can feel emotions like fear and happiness.
• Amusing Injuries: Happens to Fowler for the most part and to Rocky at points.
  Fowler: Ohh!!! There go the goujons.
• And the Adventure Continues: After taking down Fun-Land Farms, the epilogue reveals that the chickens are setting out to liberate some chickens from another farm.
• Art Shift: The documentary Dr. Fry and Smith watch is done in the manner of UPA-style Limited Animation in 2D. The Creative Closing Credits also emulate this style.
• Astonishingly Appropriate Interruption: When she finds Dr. Fry wandering around with a decorative egg stuck on his head (courtesy of the rescue team), Mrs. Tweedy scoffs that he's as worthless as a headless...and then screams "chicken!" as she sees Ginger and Rocky.
• Ax-Crazy: Mrs. Tweedy becomes increasingly unhinged after discovering that Ginger, her old nemesis, has infiltrated the farm, and eventually literally comes after her with an ax.
• Bad News in a Good Way: Rocky launches himself into Funland Farms to rescue Molly, getting zapped by the electric fence, attacked by the robotic animal "guards", and sucked into a vent in the process. Mac ventures that at least they know some necessary details about the place now.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • When Molly hatches from her egg, she’s launched into the air and falls onto what looks like a pile of rocks contained in a wheelbarrow. However, a chicken moves the wheelbarrow away, revealing that Molly landed safely on a pile of soft hay.
  • At first, it seems that Ginger was going to rally the hens to put a stop to the new chicken farm, only to advise them to hide instead.
  • After Frizzle is fitted with a collar that brainwashes her, Molly curls up into a corner and begins to cry as the scene appears to phase out. The camera suddenly zooms back in as Molly stands up and refuses to give in to despair, promising Frizzle that she'll come back for her before running off to find an exit.
  • Whilst Mrs. Tweedy and Dr. Fry are showing Reginald Smith the nugget making process, it looks as though Mrs. Tweedy is pointing to Frizzle as the chicken to be sent into the processor. However, it’s then revealed that she instead was pointing towards a different chicken who was standing in front of Frizzle.
  • Reginald presents Mrs. Tweedy with a small black ring box, and she coyly comments that this is so sudden, suggesting he's proposing. It's actually just the new dip his restaurant chain cooked up for the nuggets.
    Mrs. Tweedy: Mm, sweet...
    Reginald: ...and sour.
  • When Mrs. Tweedy's axe swings back around, it looks like she's going to be decapitated, but instead she gets hit in the face by the handle. Then she falls into the grinder, but instead of getting turned into nuggets, she gets stuck, causing the machine to overload, and just comes out covered in breadcrumbs but still alive.
• Batman Gambit: The chickens' plan to infiltrate the farm involves sending a fake cake up to the gates and having the chicken hiding in it smash it in the guard's face...which probably would have failed if they hadn't been correct in thinking he'd pick it up.
• Blind Without 'Em: Mac loses her glasses in the corn silo and says she "cannae see a sausage" without them.
• Bookends: The movie begins with Rocky telling Ginger about how their current life is their "happy ending". When he brings it up again in the end, she coins it as a "happy beginning".
• Borrowed Catchphrase: While under the brainwashing collar's influence, Ginger asks if she's "going on a holiday", similar to what the resident ditz Babs often said in the first movie.
• Both Sides Have a Point: While Ginger's reluctance to let the free-spirited Molly leave the island is overbearing parenting and more than a tad hypocritical besides, Ginger's concerns are also rightly rooted in the fact that the world across the water is populated largely by humans who see Ginger and Molly as delicious.
• Bound and Gagged: The security guard in charge of the surveillance cameras is left bound by yarn and gagged by tape courtesy of Ginger's Angels.
• Brick Joke:
  • Fetcher brings an umbrella with him while sneaking into Fun-Land Farms. The umbrella isn't mentioned again until Fetcher witnesses the factory exploding from afar and he realizes that he had left it inside.
  • As part of their new plan of keeping the island hidden, Ginger tells her husband that he'll have to give up crowing. When the Chicken Clan prepares to storm another farmhouse, Rocky asks if they can bring back crowing to which his wife agrees, thus leading to the whole Clan crowing ala Battle Cry.
• Call-Back:
  • The newspaper clippings in the beginning show the aftermath of the pie machine explosion and Mrs. Tweedy's defeat.
  • Rocky tells the story of his life as the Lone Free Ranger to Molly, which spurs her to seek adventure like her daddy allegedly did.
  • Rocky's past of being shot through a cannon gives Nick and Fetch the idea of shooting Rocky out of the air vents through a grid with a powerful fan.
• The Caper: The film parodies many of the tropes of the classic caper/heist movie, as the heroes assemble a team (of chickens and rats) to break into a target installation, assigning each of them a specialty.
• Catapult Nightmare: Ginger bolts upright after having a nightmare about Mrs. Tweedy stealing Molly.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Molly climbs into one of the buckets the chickens use when they're farming as a younger chick. She ends up climbing into one of the fast-food buckets on an upwards conveyor belt to reach the mind-control-collar remote.
  • Rocky introduces popcorn-making early in the film, and it is the key to an improvised escape by the end.
  • Babs brings her knitting, as always. She ends up knitting bindings for a guard who spots her, Mac, and Bunty so that the chickens can check the security camera feed for Molly undisturbed.
  • Rocky lassoes the villain's axe when he swings onto the catwalk to save Ginger and Molly. Later, Rocky is stuck holding on to his wife and daughter as Mrs. Tweedy encroaches on them, and the axe swings back and hits her in the face, saving the chickens.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Fowler is mostly offscreen while he sets up the zipline the group is using for their getaway. As the villain is threatening the heroes with an axe, he slides in on the zipline, hitting Mrs. Tweedy in the face.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: While Mrs. Tweedy returns as the Big Bad, Mr. Tweedy only appears in flashbacks and isn't even alluded to at all beyond Mrs. Tweedy introducing Dr. Fry as her current husband.
• Claymation: The film was mainly done with the traditional Aardman claymation, although, some of the background chickens were actually CGI, and there are also a few computer-generated visual effects. Because of the 2005 studio fire, many of the original assets from the first film were destroyed, and they had to rely on the "Making of" book to remember how they did the first film. Also, the production of the film started a rumour that the studio was running out of clay, which was debunked.
• Continuity Nod:
  • At one point, Molly escapes her playpen by digging out a tunnel with a spoon, much like Ginger's first escape attempt in the previous film's introduction.
  • "We mustn't panic... We mustn't panic..."
  • Babs, Bunty and Mac resort to attacking a security guard when they find themselves cornered, just like how they attacked Mr. Tweedy in the last film's climax.
  • The chicken that's selected to be made into nuggets has the number 314 on her collar. The same number is notable as being the first three digits of pi — a reference to the chicken pies that were planned to be mass produced in the first film.
  • Ginger says "Bye-bye, again" just before she foils Mrs. Tweedy's plans to turn the chickens into nuggets.
  • In the first film, Mrs. Tweedy falls into her pie machine's safety valve, leading to the machine's destruction. In this film, Mrs. Tweedy falls into the grinder, overloading it and causing her to be covered in breadcrumbs.
  • Babs still somehow believes the island is their "'oliday". A brainwashed Ginger would refer to her adventure as a 'oliday.
  • Just like the ending of the first movie where the chickens used their flying machine to create their new houses, they use the salvaged remains of Fun-Land Farms technology to improve their own lives.
• Cool Airship: The chickens build one out of cotton wool so it can fly over the fences at Fun-Land Farms. From the outside, it just looks like an innocuous cloud. In the epilogue, Molly and Frizzle use it to scout the countryside looking for chicken farms to strike at next.
• Crapsaccharine World: The inside of Fun-Land Farms is bright and colorful; the chickens can eat as much of the available food as they want, and they do nothing but play all day. Of course, this isn't down to charity. It's so the chickens are not stressed out when they get slaughtered for nuggets, resulting in more tender and tasty meat.
• Crossover Cameo: In the final shot of the film, Feathers McGraw from the Wallace & Gromit franchise is shown with the rest of the chickens, complete with his chicken disguise.
• Deadly Euphemism: Fun-Land Farms' slogan is "Where chickens find their happy endings." And indeed, they are happy when they are brainwashed to blindly walk into a grinder and become chicken nuggets.
• Defector from Paradise: Molly wants to escape the island and explore the outside world, something that Ginger is vehemently against.
• Deus Ax Machina: Mrs. Tweedy procures a classic red fire axe to attack the chickens in the film's climax.
• Disney Death: A villainous example. During the climax, Mrs. Tweedy plummets into the grinder intended for the chickens, complete with what appears to be a Gory Discretion Shot just before she lands. Shortly afterwards, she emerges from the produce line, covered in oil and breadcrumbs but otherwise unharmed, and continues to pursue the escapees.
• The Ditz:
  • Babs, as always.
    Ginger: It's go time.
    Babs: It's alright. I went before we left.
  • Also, Molly to a certain extent. But it is understandable since she is new to the world and does not know about things like penguins and death wishes.
• The Door Slams You:
  • Mrs. Tweedy slams the door to the courtyard into a poor guard, who is seen wobbling in the background before slumping down.
  • Later, the stampede of freed chickens burst those doors from their hinges, slamming down on Reginald Smith and the same guard.
• Draw Aggro:
  • While trying to convince Molly to escape, Ginger gets spotted by Mrs. Tweedy, who instantly recognizes the bane of her existence. Glancing quickly to the side, Ginger guesses that her nemesis hasn't seen Molly and races towards her to distract her.
  • Rocky also draws attention to himself by dancing for the human antagonists to give Ginger and Molly time to escape. After he notices that his family is safely gone, he stops dancing and starts running away.
• Dutch Angle: The camera goes tilty when Molly realizes that there's something wrong with the chickens at Fun-Land Farms.
• Eggshell Clothing: At the beginning, Rocky and Ginger's egg runs around with just her feet sticking out of the bottom of the shell.
• Escalating War: Played for Laughs; during the "Molly grows up" montage, Rocky has to jump into the water to keep her from sailing to the mainland with Nick and Fetcher. Seeing her husband soaked, Ginger snickers. Rocky shakes the excess water all over her, causing her to drench him with her drink in retaliation. What we see concludes with Rocky chasing her with a container of water.
• Establishing Character Moment: Molly only needs to get one leg out of her egg before she hops out of her parents' hut and explores outside, all while squealing in joy instead of fear.
• "Eureka!" Moment: The heroes are trapped in a corn silo with no apparent way out when the villain turns on the grinder. As the corn begins to sink under their feet, Rocky remembers that popcorn is made out of corn and comes up with an idea to boost them out. It takes Ginger a few seconds, but she has the same "lightbulb" moment.
• Exactly What I Aimed At: When Rocky swings towards her, Mrs. Tweedy steps aside and gives a loud, "Hah!", confident in having outwitted him... only to find her axe being yanked out of her hand with the rope.
• Fairy Tale Motifs: There are several elements from The Adventures of Pinocchio, such as the child protagonist disobeying their parent(s) to explore the world beyond their home, only to end up in a Pleasure Island-themed trap which transforms the attendees into a valuable commodity. She even gets a best friend who's akin to Candlewick who wants to have fun, inspires the protagonist to make questionable choices and ends up falling prey to the nefarious manipulations of the twisted theme park.
• Fearless Infant: Molly has been wild and adventurous since shortly before she hatched, much to her parents' dismay.
• Feel No Pain: One of the first signs that something is off about the chickens in Fun-Land Farms is that they don't react to potential injury. Molly first discovers this when she barrels into a hen trying to climb up a slide and the hen doesn't show any pain or annoyance. Once she's sensitized to this, she notices all sorts of other similar behavior, such as one chicken who's head-down in a golf hole, being lightly whacked with a putter, and not yelling or trying hard to escape. It's a result of the mind-control collars.
• First-Name Basis: Reginald Smith and Mrs. Tweedy call each other by their first names.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: One of the chickens at Fun-Land Farms tries to walk up a slide that Molly is using, followed by more of them doing it. It then quickly becomes apparent that they're being brainwashed.
• Flashback with the Other Darrin: Averted. The film opens with a recap of the first movie narrated by Rocky, and despite Ginger being recast, Julia Sawalha's voice is still heard in these scenes; she is even credited.
• Food Porn: Despite the horrifying context behind it, the chicken nuggets that Mrs. Tweedy produces to demonstrate her plan to Reginald Smith with do look pretty tasty. Though perhaps that only makes the context more unsettling.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Mrs. Tweedy appears in flashbacks and a dream sequence in the first half of the film before she reappears in person as the mastermind behind Fun-Land Farms.
  • Fun-Land Farms features a happy chicken in a bucket, which convinces Molly and Frizzle to hitch a ride on the truck to the new farm as they want their own bucket. It's later revealed by Dr. Fry and Mrs. Tweedy that the happy chickens of Fun-Land Farms are turned into nuggets and put into fast-food buckets, as depicted by their real bucket logo, and poor Molly gets to witness this first-hand. Later in the film's climax, Molly would ride on one of these buckets to get the remote to free all the chickens from the mind-control collars.
  • Early on, Rocky introduces popcorn to Molly and calls it "the answer to all life's problems." When the chickens are stuck in the corn silo, they get the idea to create popcorn to boost them out of there, with Ginger calling it "the answer to all life's problems" as well.
• Freeze-Frame Ending: As Ginger and the gang prepare to break out more chickens from another farm, they all cry "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" before the frame freezes and The End appears.
• Freudian Slip: During a Motive Rant to Reginald Smith, Mrs. Tweedy boasts that she will finally have revenge, referring to Ginger and the other chickens that escaped from her in the previous film. Mr. Smith isn't sure what she means, so Tweedy quickly clarifies that she meant to say "revenue".
• Generational Trauma: Despite now living a happy life with Rocky, her daughter, and all of her friends, Ginger is clearly still traumatized by what she saw on the Tweedy farm and fears anything happening to take away the paradise they've built. This leads to her being overly protective of Molly, not telling her the truth about why they're on the island and forbidding her from leaving (and getting ticked at Rocky when he told Molly about their past).
• Genre Shift: The original film was a fairly grounded and gritty parody of prison escape stories framed against an English chicken farm. This installment is a more over-the-top spy caper with extravagant evil lairs and robotic moles and ducks.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: This is what the Fun-Land Farms collars do — they brainwash chickens into being happy all the time, so that they are more willing to get turned into nuggets and their meat tastes better.
• Gilded Cage: Molly apparently feels this way about the island. It's a lovely idyll, but Ginger's overprotectiveness stifles a young chicken who wants to go out and see the world.
• Glass Smack and Slide: During the pursuit of the Fun-Land Farms' truck, Rocky landing on the skateboard sends Fowler flying into the rear window, where his face ends up smushed against the glass before sliding.
• Gold Digger: Dr. Fry has a fortune and lots of land, but Mrs. Tweedy claims she actually fell in love with his mind... which, along with the other resources, provides the means to enact a lucrative business plan. She's also seen putting the moves on her prospective business partner Reginald Smith, targeting him as a future husband once Fry is no longer useful to her.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • As Molly learns the dark truth about the purpose of chickens in the world of man via cartoon presentation, the scene cuts to her expression of horror as she sees a chicken being butchered.
  • When one chicken goes into the grinder, only sounds are heard as she's turned into nuggets, which Ginger makes Molly look away from.
• Grand Staircase Entrance: Mrs. Tweedy makes her first entrance descending a long open spiral staircase, with a side-order of Bitch Alert even before Ginger and the audience see and recognise her face. The effect is (deliberately) slightly undermined because the entrance goes on a little too long; the restaurant man, Reginald Smith, is even shown checking his watch while he waits.
• Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Molly, while being stuck in her egg, manages to stumble off a roof and hang in midair for a moment to realise what has happened before falling.
• Happiness Is Mandatory: In Fun-Land Farms, every chicken is completely happy, whether they like it or not thanks to their collars. This is to prevent them from trying to flee from the nugget processor, which would tie knots into their muscles and make their meat dry and tasteless.
• Has a Type: Mrs. Tweedy is back and she has a new husband this time, who pretty much both looks and behaves like a slightly more intelligent version of Mr. Tweedy, but not by much.
• Helicopter Parents: Ginger forbids Molly from leaving the island or even going off on her own. While Ginger's desire to keep Molly safe at the sanctuary is understandable, she becomes a bit too extreme about it.
• Here We Go Again!: Bunty says this when she sees Ginger get a shifty look in her eye after seeing the deforestation and the convoy of lorries from the island.
• Heroic Willpower: Mrs. Tweedy has to turn the settings on the mind control collar all the way up to eleven, which haven't been tested yet, before it starts to have an effect on Ginger. Even then, Ginger is able to briefly resist the effects.
• Hijacked by Ganon: The film at first sets up Dr. Fry as the new Big Bad, being responsible for the mind control collars and all the operations at Fun-Land Farms, with Reginald Smith of Sir Eat-A-Lot as the Greater-Scope Villain. Then halfway into the film, Dr. Fry introduces Smith to his wife, Mrs. Melisha Tweedy, the Big Bad of the first film and the real brains behind the new farm.
• Honorary Uncle: Nick and Fetcher hold this position in regards to Molly. It's actually somewhat relevant to the plot, since the rats only agree to help infiltrate Fun-Land Farms once they learn Molly is stuck there — when they think it's just Rocky in there, they aren't too fussed.
• Humans Are Morons: According to Frizzle, humans just aren't very clever at all. As humans feed the chickens and cater to them, they are in her words "glorified waiting staff". Throughout the film, the guards of Fun-Land Farms are shown to be hilariously incompetent.
• Hurricane of Puns: The newspaper clipping recounting the explosion at the Tweedy's farm is full of poultry related puns.
• Hypno Trinket: All chickens brought to Fun-Land Farms are outfitted with mind-control collars. Molly and Frizzle manage to escape it when Frizzle decides she doesn't like the look of the collar-fitting machine and jumps onto an "already collared" part of the conveyor belt. However, when Dr. Fry sees that Frizzle doesn't have a collar on, he comes to force one on her personally, though luckily, he still misses Molly.
• I Am Not Shazam: In-Universe, Reginald Smith has to keep reminding Dr. Fry that he is just the CEO of the Sir Eat-A-Lot restaurant chain, that his actual name is not "Sir Eat-A-Lot", and that he's not the Knight in Shining Armor on the company's promotional material.
• I Choose to Stay: After escaping from the silo and being presented with an escape route thanks to Fowler, Ginger ultimately decides to hold up on leaving until she rescues Molly's friend and the rest of the imprisoned chickens. Her friends immediately follow her example.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Rocky tells Ginger that there's no need to worry with him on the job of looking after their daughter... and immediately asks what to do in a panic when Molly begins breaking the eggshell.
• Impossibly Delicious Food: The nuggets are so delicious that, after eating one, Reginald Smith momentarily loses his composure and blurts out "I love you, Mummy" like the little boy in the ad.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Nick and Fetcher are prone to bawling, especially when Molly refers to them as her uncles.
• Internal Reveal: Molly, having grown up in a chicken sanctuary, doesn't have any idea what humans do to the poultry that live on their farms. She gets a nasty (though non-graphic) education when she sits in on Dr. Fry's cartoon presentation of the Fun-Land Farms process.
• Ironic Echo: When Ginger tells her daughter early on that she is not to leave the island, Molly says that she isn't the boss of her. Later, when Ginger is under the influence of a mind-control collar, she says the same thing to Molly when she tries to convince her that they need to escape.
• It's All My Fault: While trapped in the silo with no hope of escaping, Molly breaks down in tears, blaming herself for getting everyone in trouble by running away. Her parents also accept that they're just as guilty (Rocky for inspiring her with his past as a Lone Free Ranger to Ginger for trying too hard to keep her trapped on the island).
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The mind-control collars seem to suppress chickens' memories in addition to altering their emotions. Neither Frizzle nor Ginger remember who Molly is after they've been collared, or anything else besides that they love Mrs. Tweedy and being happy at Fun-Land Farms. The effect wears off as soon as the collar is removed, leaving the wearer unable to remember what they said and did while under the collar's influence.
• Laser Sight: The exploding robot ducks in the farm's moat have built-in laser sights, for no obvious reason beyond it being a popular trope that looks cool.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Rocky tends to charge into danger head-on, as seen by his attempt to catapult into the Fun-Land Farms headquarters; he immediately gets electrocuted and comically injured by all the high-tech security. Mac points out that his charge at least was beneficial in showing them all the various hazards they need to plan around for their next, more successful, attempt.
• Let's Meet the Meat: The Fun-Land Farms deliberately invoke this, using mind-control collars to keep the chickens in a state of blissful happiness as they're led to their deaths.
• Lighter and Softer: With the Genre Shift from a prison escape story to a spy caper, the film significantly dials back the Black Comedy with a stronger emphasis on slapstick, and the colour palette is noticeably more vibrant and saturated compared to the more grungy and muted colours of the original.
• Like Mother, Like Daughter: During the course of the movie, it is often mentioned how Molly is very much like her mother.
• Load-Bearing Boss: When Mrs. Tweedy is eventually blown up by the exploding robot ducks, her farm (which was already coming apart) collapses completely.
• Made of Iron:
  • Rocky's Leeroy Jenkins charge into Fun-Land Farms has him showcasing all the various defences keeping intruders out to the others by painfully enduring each and every one, from electric fences to robotic exploding ducks. He's still conscious and moving by the end of it all.
  • To top getting blown up by her pie machine and getting crushed by a giant barn door in the first movie, Mrs. Tweedy manages to survive getting fried by her nugget maker.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Despite having an island full of chickens who proved capable in the last film, when Ginger says they'll need back up, she and the others only get Nick and Fetcher.
• Meaningful Background Event: Several of the chickens at Fun-Land Farms can be seen getting themselves into accidents and generally acting weird a few minutes before it's made clear they're being mind-controlled.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • During their first meeting, Frizzle tells Molly, "you and me, kidda, all the way." Molly repeats the phrase when explaining why she came back for Frizzle after her friend was put under brainwashing.
  • When Rocky prepares to launch himself into Funland Farms to rescue Molly (without a plan), he tells Ginger that "sometimes you've just got to take a leap". Ginger repeats the sentence as she sees Rocky preparing to leap into the fray, saving her from having to choose between rescuing Molly from Mrs. Tweedy or keeping the brainwashed chickens out of the grinder.
• Missing Steps Plan: Rocky's initial "plan" is to just break in and rescue Molly. Bunty lampshades that that's not really a plan.
• Model Planning: Mac illustrates the plan to get in using a mini replica of the farm.
• Mundane Utility: When they get back to the island, one of the robot ducks with laser vision gets repaired... and put to use as a popcorn heater.
• Newspaper Backstory: In the beginning, there are newspaper clippings on the wall of Rocky and Ginger's hut recapping the events of the last film.
• No One Should Survive That!: Somehow, Mrs. Tweedy survived the grinder and batter machine. Of course, this is after she's already survived a pie machine explosion and having a barn door dropped on her during the first movie.
• Nothing Can Save Us Now: When the chickens end up landing at the bottom of a corn silo, Bunty tells Ginger that it would take a miracle for them to escape. Then Rocky tracks them down; Bunty tells Ginger with a grin not to tell him that he's the miracle lest he get too proud to endure.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • All of the characters who originated in the first film get scared upon seeing Mrs. Tweedy. Ginger has flashbacks; Rocky, Nick and Fetcher gasp; Mac, Bunty, and Babs scream, and Babs then faints.
  • Likewise, Mrs. Tweedy begins having flashbacks when she first sees Ginger, the chicken who previously destroyed her entire operation.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The mind-control effects from the collars are so strong, they can get Ginger to say with complete earnestness that Mrs. Tweedy is the loveliest woman in the whole world.
• Out Of Control Popcorn: The gang use the corn silo and the heat from the sun's light to make a vast amount of popcorn so vigorously that it blasts them out.
• Parental Hypocrisy: Ginger and Rocky's daughter, Molly, wants to escape and explore outside of the island but her mother is against this, despite having had similar (on the surface level) sentiments about leaving the farm. Downplayed in that Tweedy's Farm was an awful place where the chickens had to lay eggs or get killed, whereas their sanctuary has no farmers, wide-open spaces and plenty of food.
• Parental Love Song: "My Sweet Baby"; the lyrics and the visuals indicate that Ginger and Rocky love their daughter despite how terrifying her fearless nature is for them and wish she wouldn't grow up so soon.
• Parody: It's The Caper, heisting a classic Bond-movie-style base. But the base is a farm, and the team are chickens and rats. It's definitely at the affectionate end of the (free) range, though.
• Platonic Declaration of Love: Ginger calls her long-time friend Bunty "love" as they prepare to infiltrate the farm.
• Pleasure Island: Inside the new farm is a play pen filled with joyful entertainment for the chickens as well as plentiful amounts of food on which to gorge themselves. However, it's simply a ruse to produce flavourful tender meat from said chickens.
• Poor Communication Kills: Molly is curious about life beyond the island, but is forbidden to leave. Her parents and the rest of the community never tell her about the dangers of the outside world aside from vague warnings, which only piques Molly's interest even more and prompts her to run away to see for herself.
• Pun: In the promotional material, Ginger is called the "wing-leader", and Molly is called a "chick off the old block."
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: Fowler, dissatisfied with his role as "getaway", recounts his R.A.F. past to an uninterested snail.
• Retcon:
  • The ending of the first movie showed a bunch of chicks having been hatched and living with the older chickens on the island. In this sequel, Molly is depicted as the only chick on the island.
  • The first movie was set in 1959, according to the filmmakers themselves. In the prologue of this film, a newspaper reporting on the destruction of Tweedy's Farm has an explicit publication date of November 4th, 1953.
  • According to the first film's tie-in book Cutting Loose: Behind the Fences at Tweedy's Farm, after all the chickens escaped, Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy moved to Scotland and started a seaweed farm. In this film, instead Mrs. Tweedy remained in the meat industry and remarried.
• Revenge: This is ultimately Mrs. Tweedy's real intention with Fun-Land Farms and the chicken nuggets. Being humiliated and ruined in the first film thanks to Ginger, Mrs. Tweedy doubles down on the chicken business by investing in mind-control technology and high security to destroy the chickens' free will before making them happily walk to their deaths, with revenue being a secondary goal. Upon seeing Ginger again, Mrs. Tweedy decides to make the chicken slaughter a lot more personal.
• Sacrificial Lamb: Just like Edwina in the first movie, another minor chicken (this time, an unnamed one wearing the #314 number on her collar) is killed off to once again drive the point that the chickens' lives are at stake.
• Sadistic Choice: When Ginger has the remote to stop the machine and free the chickens from their control collars, Mrs. Tweedy holds Molly down and places an axe against her neck. Ginger can push the button and watch her child be beheaded, or do nothing and watch all her friends fall into the nugget machine. Thanks to Rocky's intervention, it never comes to either option.
• Schizo Tech: While Fun-Land Farms is protected by advanced automated defence, the eye-scanner attached to the guard's entrance is amusingly operated by a very bored receptionist who has to consult a large heavy book full of photos to match the retina scan to.
• Secret Legacy: Molly is kept unaware of her parents' past for most of her life, believing that their community has always lived on the island. So, when she learns that her mother was a freedom fighter and her father is an ex-circus star, she's not only impressed, but inspired to go to the main land and be a "lone free ranger". She even gets to see them in action during parts of the film.
• Shout-Out:
  • Plenty to Mission: Impossible. At one point, a plagiarism-free version of the theme plays when the chickens break into Fun-Land Farms.
    Nick: It's an impossible mission!
    Fetcher: Shouldn't that be the other way 'round?
  • When the villain axes open the truck roof, Frizzle says that they'll need a bigger bucket.
  • This isn't the first time someone with bright orange hair (or in this case, feathers) has been named Frizzle.
• A Simple Plan: Ginger concocts a plan to free all the chickens from Fun-Land Farms. At first, it seems like the plan works out well, as it is accompanied by images of the chickens successfully carrying out the plan, but it then cuts back to Ginger telling the plan, and it immediately goes awry when Rocky pushes the button on the wrong remote control.
• Solar-Powered Magnifying Glass: When the chickens are trapped in the grain silo, they are able to get out by using a firework to popcorn-ise the grain, boosting them up and out through the ceiling. Lacking matches, Molly comes up with the idea to use Mac's glasses to light it.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: "Summer Holiday" by Cliff Richard, which is a rather upbeat and lighthearted song, plays in the movie while a bunch of brainwashed chickens are walking towards the nugget making machine and Ginger is battling Mrs. Tweedy.
• Spanner in the Works: Mrs. Tweedy's plan to make a fortune with the nugget was going perfectly well until Molly got captured and taken to the farm, leading to Rocky, Ginger, and the others breaking in to rescue her.
• Spin-Offspring: This movie is as much about Ginger and Rocky's daughter, Molly, as it is about them.
• Stealth Pun:
  • Ginger is a rather overprotective parent, making her daughter "Molly-coddled".
  • Fowler seems to treat the falling popcorn as a type of precipitation and refers to the unpredictability of British weather right before Bunty lands on top of him. In other words, it's raining hen.
• Stepford Smiler: The collared chickens at the new dangerous chicken farm are blissful and completely happy to be there, even happy to be facing death.
• Team Power Walk: The main characters (sans Rocky) slowly walk towards the camera as they prepare to infiltrate Fun-Land Farms.
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: While vaunting the superiority of the Fun-Land Farms method, the commercial shows a boy complaining in a thoroughly calm tone that his chicken is tough, dry and flavorless and telling his mother he hates her. When his mother gets him a bucket of the farm's nuggets, he instead says in a scarcely more emotional tone that the chicken is delicious and tells his mother he loves her.
• This Is No Time to Panic: Once again, Bunty says, "We mustn't panic... We mustn't panic...", but instead of all hell breaking loose, Fowler insists that this is indeed an appropriate time to panic.
• Title Drop:
  • When a chicken is made to walk blissfully to the processor, Ginger futilely whispers, "Run, chicken, run!"
  • Instead of chicken pot pies like last time, Mrs. Tweedy plans to turn the birds into chicken nuggets, calling it "the dawn of the nugget".
• Trailers Always Spoil: The return of Mrs. Tweedy was kept under wraps during development, and in the film itself, the revelation doesn't occur until just past the halfway point, with it being treated as a major twist. Despite this, it was revealed ahead of time by the first teaser trailer, and remained a prominent selling point in most of the trailers and marketing.
• Trauma Button: For Ginger, Rocky, and their friends, the appearance of Mrs. Tweedy is enough to give them traumatic flashbacks to the events of the first film. Although Mrs. Tweedy also has traumatic flashbacks of her last encounter with Ginger.
• Uncertain Doom: Much like her comeuppance in the original film, Mrs. Tweedy is never seen again after she's fired on by security drones, leaving her survival ambiguous. Additionally, the fates of Dr. Fry, Reginald Smith and the Fun-Land Farms workers are also left up in the air when the factory is last shown exploding from afar.
• Unholy Matrimony: Mrs. Tweedy's relationship with Dr. Fry is much closer to this trope than her previous marriage was. Fry does not seem to resent his wife at all, and, though he chuckles nervously sometimes, he doesn't fear her as much as Mr. Tweedy. He also supports her ambitions and shares in her passion for animal cruelty.
• We Need a Distraction: Rocky resorts to giving a random, funky dance performance in front of Mrs. Tweedy and her staff to give Molly and Ginger some time to escape.
• Wham Shot: The reveal of Mrs. Tweedy being alive at the end of the teaser trailer.
• Would Hurt a Child: Upon realizing that Molly is Ginger's daughter, Mrs. Tweedy is more than willing to personally threaten the chick with decapitation just to hurt Ginger.
• The X of Y: The sneak preview confirms the film is subtitled Dawn of the Nugget.
• "You!" Exclamation: Mrs. Tweedy says "You!" upon seeing Ginger for the first time in years.
• You're Insane!: When Rocky asks if anyone has a match for the firework, Nick tells him that he's "a match" for an absolute lunatic; if he lights the fuse now, they'll be way too close when the firework explodes.

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