Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget

Simple can be both efficient and effective and so it was when the plucky chucks of Chicken Run first hit the scene in 2000. The Aardman classic took PoW camp ideas - familiar from a thousand re-runs of The Great Escape at Christmas - and plonked them into a chicken farm, with the hens hatching plans to break-out. All of this is shown in a recap at the start of the sequel, which by dint of being more sprawling than the original, lacks the same sharply funny focus, although it's not without its moments.

Time has moved on and Ginger and Rocky (now voiced by Thandiwe Newton and Zachary Levi) and their feathered friends are living an idyllic life on a secluded island. They've also added to their brood and the first section of the film charts their daughter Molly (Bella Ramsey) from egg to the cusp of adolescence, when she is a self-declared "big girl".

In keeping with a long line of young screen heroines, she decides to head off the island, without her parents' permission. Things look as though they are going well after she makes a new buddy, Frizzle ( Josie Sedgwick-Davies, the best addition to the sequel who could use more screentime), but after the pair of them decide the look of Fun-Land Farms, trouble isn't far behind.

This is where the enjoyable meat of the film really starts and it's a shame Sam Fell takes such a long time to get there. Once he does, however, the joke ratio rises sharply, as Frizzle and Molly find themselves in a sort of manufactured Truman Show-like environment where the chickens are turned into zombies, trying to get out, while Ginger and Rocky are trying to get in. Meanwhile Molly's mum and dad have realised she's missing and set out to try to find her - encountering old nemesis Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) on the way.

The action element of the film has the enjoyable verve of the original, particularly when the mechanics of the nugget-maker are involved, but the lack of a tight focus on characters in one place makes the emotional heart of the matter more diffuse. Films like Toy Story score so highly on the heart scale by keeping their main group together most of the time, or making sure that if the focus shifts, it is laser like on a rescue. Here, Fell is putting so many eggs in the basket it's hard to know where we should be looking. The characters also feel paler this time out, particularly Rocky, who is nowhere near as cocky as he used to be. Even if this is on the formulaic side, you can rely on Aardman to deliver that formula with a fair amount of panache.