One of the best comedy movies of the 2000s – Aardman Animation’s Chicken Run – is getting a long-awaited sequel which will be out later in 2023. Lucky animated movie fans attending the Annecy Festival in the French Alps in June will get the first look at the highly anticipated movie at the Netflix panel. Chicken Run 2 is expected on Netflix in November 2023.
Netflix’s main panel promises to give fans a sneak peek at a number of upcoming projects including Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (a high-octane sequel to 2000’s Chicken Run), Exploding Kittens (a new adult animated comedy series starring Tom Ellis and Lucy Liu), and Leo (a coming-of-age animated musical comedy starring Adam Sandler).
Netflix won the Best Animated Feature Oscar for the first time in 2023, for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. The final two animated movies that Netflix will present at the Annecy Festival panel are Blue Eye Samurai (about a master of the sword who lives a life in disguise while seeking revenge in Edo-period Japan), and The Monkey King (an adaptation of the classic Chinese tale Journey to the West).
Chicken Run starred Julia Sawalha as the plucky Ginger, and Mel Gibson as the cocky Rocky, in a prison-break movie which was an affectionate pastiche of 1963’s The Great Escape. In Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Zachary Levi plays Rocky and Thandiwe Newton plays Ginger. Bella Ramsay (Ellie in The Last of Us) plays their daughter Molly. Most importantly, Jane Horrocks is back as the voice of fan-favourite character Babs.
The synopsis of Chicken Run 2 is as follows; “Having pulled off a death-defying escape from Tweedy’s farm, Ginger has finally found her dream – a peaceful island sanctuary for the whole flock, far from the dangers of the human world. When she and Rocky hatch a little girl called Molly, Ginger’s happy ending seems complete. But back on the mainland the whole of chicken-kind faces a new and terrible threat. For Ginger and her team, even if it means putting their own hard-won freedom at risk – this time, they’re breaking in.”
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