YMMV / Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget

• Awesome Music:
  • "My Sweet Baby", an upbeat, sweet song that plays during a montage of Molly growing up at the beginning which perfectly fits the movie's themes of loving your child but being afraid to let them go.
  • The movie uses some remixes of the scores from the first film, which were already great. The score that plays when Ginger and her crew are breaking into Fun-Land Farms is a standout, mixing the classic Leitmotif of the first movie with a Mission: Impossible inspired tune.
• Complete Monster (includes the first film): Melisha Tweedy is a ruthless, insatiably greedy woman who knows chickens are sapient and yet goes to any length in abusing them for profit. Marrying her first husband Willard to inherit his chicken farm, Tweedy runs the farm like a brutal labor camp, forcing the hens to output enough eggs in a week's time lest they be killed—she demonstrates this by beheading Edwina for failing to meet her quota. Tired of "minuscule profits", Tweedy plans to butcher the farm's entire population to create chicken pies she can trademark and sell. When the hens mount an escape attempt lead by Ginger, Tweedy grabs an axe and tries to murder Ginger for escaping. Returning years after her seeming defeat, Tweedy has a new scheme to slake her desire for both revenue and revenge. Taking advantage of her second husband Dr. Fry's mind-altering technology, Tweedy creates "Fun-Land Farms" as a seeming paradise for chickens; in truth, it is a prison that will hypnotize hundreds of chickens into happily marching to their own deaths so they can be turned into nuggets, which Tweedy hopes to springboard into a global industry of chicken slaughter. As Ginger and her family sabotage Fun-Land Farms, Tweedy gleefully takes the family's young daughter Molly as a hostage and subjects Ginger to the most painful settings of Fry's technology, all to avenge herself upon the chickens who foiled her.
• Director Displacement: The movie is often associated with DreamWorks Animation, given the original movie was co-created by them. In reality, this movie was created by Aardman Animations alone, given the association between both studios ended after the Troubled Production of Flushed Away.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Some critics were not thrilled about the film reusing some of the same jokes and beats from the first film, especially since several characters seem to have been Flanderized. Most notably, Babs goes from oblivious to Comically Missing the Point in almost every conversation to the point of annoyance.
• Memetic Mutation: Yassified Mrs. Tweedy ^{explanation (spoilers)}Many people on social media noticed Mrs. Tweedy had been given a glow up in her redesign, sporting fuller hair and more prominent makeup than before.
• Older Than They Think: As Cliff Richard isn't widely known outside of the UK, many non-British viewers are unaware of "Summer Holiday" being an already existing song.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Long before it came out, the film was already criticised for its recasting of about half of the returning characters. While some of these were unavoidable due to the death of Benjamin Whitrow (Fowler) and the... baggage of Mel Gibson (Rocky), some of the others have no such excuse. Julia Sawalha (Ginger) was particularly upset, calling the decision ageist. ^note As it happened, her replacement Thandiwe Newton is only four years younger (and significantly older than Sawalha was when she starred in the original), but the point stands that Sawalha was rejected without any chance to re-audition and in spite of demonstrating she could still reproduce her voice from the original.
  • Even though Harry Gregson-Williams returned to score the film, it doesn't use the trademark kazoo choir.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Some people were disappointed that Frizzle ended up being brainwashed and Out of Focus for a good chunk of the movie, coming off as if she was an Advertised Extra.
• Tough Act to Follow: The general opinion on the movie is that it’s fun and enjoyable in its own right, just not as good as the original film is.
• Unexpected Character: The return of Mrs. Tweedy came as an unexpected surprise in the teaser trailer, especially because most viewers thought getting crushed by a door in the last movie killed her, or at the very least thought the whole ordeal would have made her retire from chicken farming. There was also no mention of Miranda Richardson returning for the sequel until the teaser trailer showed that Mrs. Tweedy was back; it's possible that since it looked like she wasn't involved in the sequel, people just assumed she wouldn't be there.

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