If you didn’t watch Chicken Run as a child, did you even have a childhood?

Honestly, “I don’t want to be a pie, I don’t like gravy” is my go-to awkward date joke. If he laughs, there’s a chance the date is somewhat salvageable.

If you’re anything like me, Aardman Animation’s (the geniuses behind Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts and Flushed Away) stop-motion classic Chicken Run (2000) was a staple of your childhood. And if you’re as old as me, you probably owned the VHS at some point and watched it so much that you eventually wore it down into nothingness.

The film told the story of a flock of chickens who see a charismatic rooster named Rocky as their only hope to escape the farm when their owners (OMG, Mrs. Tweedy, though) prepare to turn them into chicken pies.

F*ck, Mrs. Tweedy is still haunting my nightmares 19 years later.

An Aardman and DreamWorks partnership made this stop-motion film a global hit in the year 2000. It was Aardman’s first feature-length movie and was directed by the now legendary Nick Park and Peter Lord. Julia Sawalha (Saffy from Ab Fab) and Mel Gibson (let’s hope he’s nowhere near the second film) leant their voices to the lead roles, Ginger and Rocky.

Chicken Run took $224 million at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time.

It’s basically The Great Escape with northern chickens. It’s everything.

And now now Netflix confirmed the Chicken Run sequel was expected to enter production next year on Twitter.

Aardman actually announced that the second instalment was in ‘early development’ way back in 2018.

Then in 2019, Will Becher, co-director of Aardman’s latest film A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, offered something of an update, telling us that the talented folk had begun crafting the chickens for the sequel.

Speaking to Flickering Myth, he said: “Well, all I can tell you is that there were a lot of chickens being made towards the end of our film.

“We have a model-making team and, at one point, it was just full of sheep, but slowly over the course of the following weeks it became overrun with chickens.

“So there is definitely an intention there and it was announced they are in pre-production on a sequel.”

Probably the best news of 2020 tbh.