Chicken Little (2005)

Chicken Little (2005)

After the embarrassing Home on the Range, Disney decided that traditional, hand-drawn animation had run its course and it was time to focus on fully computer animated features from now on; the first of these was Chicken Little, an attempt to modernise and spice-up the Disney formula. Chicken Little is probably the worst Disney movie ever made. There is so little to like about this movie and so much to hate that I scarcely know where to start; as always, I’ll do my best to approach the film’s animation, story, characters and music individually, but forgive me if this review begins to break down a little structurally, asChicken Little is so mind-bogglingly bad that it is very difficult to stay calm and controlled when discussing it. With that in mind, let’s take a look!

Being Disney’s first fully computer animated movie since Dinosaur, you’d think Chicken Little would look a lot better, as the Disney animators had five years to improve their software, their techniques and realise what they did wrong with Dinosaur and how they could do things better. Somehow, Chicken Little looks a million times worse; Dinosaur’s animation was dull and dated, but at least still technically impressive for the time, Chicken Little’s animation is so inherently and definitively visually unappealing that I find it legitimately astounding that these animators were able to look at it so long without ever thinking ‘Hang on a minute THIS LOOKS FUCKING AWFUL.’ Some of the major characters have decent designs, but those of the townspeople are practically identical, to the point where it looks like the animators probably just palette swapped all the different models, like the programmers of a lazy video game. The characters have very sharp, sudden movements that do not fit Disney’s usual smooth and controlled style, a choice which betrays the nature of the entire film, which so obviously wants to be “edgier” than the usual Disney fare, in terms of animation and attitude, but is completely incompetent in its attempts to do so. The backgrounds are incredibly lazy, there is no accuracy, no attention to detail, no life or richness to the textures, it looks more like concept art than the finished product; it seems like the animators thought that if they just made the backgrounds jagged and stylised that would speak for itself and again, present a sense of “edginess”, but they are so unpolished that the characters look completely alien wandering around in them. Even the direction displays this bizarre attitude, with examples of shaky cam and sudden zooms which seem more at home in a Zack Snyder movie than a Disney one; everything about Chicken Little’s visual style wants to be hip and cool, but it all comes off as embarrassing and unprofessional.

Similarly, the film’s story desires to be edgy, clearly trying to copy the then-more successful DreamWorks, even more obviously than Home on the Range did; this is made clear straight from the opening, which mocks the traditional “Once Upon a Time” opening of fairytales, the storybook openings of early Disney films and even specifically the opening to The Lion King. Chicken Little shouts out from its first scene ‘Look at us! We’re different! We’re shaking things up!’ But its desperate attempts to distance itself from the classic Disney formula comes off as a mean-spirited dig at early Disney movies, as if to say they’re not cool or relevant anymore and Chicken Little is going to be something new and original that kids today will appreciate; the irony that this is so obviously copying DreamWorks – particularly Shrek, the opening scene of which is practically IDENTICAL to this one – is either completely lost on the writers, or, more likely, they just didn’t care. The entire film is plagued with this cancerous desire, resulting in an attitude towards humour which makes Home on the Range look like This is Spinal Tap; the movie is full of the worst kinds of pop-cultural references, where there is no joke, it’s literally just a reference and they expect the audience to be satisfied just because they can say ‘hey I get that!’ The sheer amount of contemporary pop songs alone is staggering, many of which are again, not thrown in for an appropriate joke, they just appear with no context, just because it’s a song they know the audience has heard. Not only that, but it really damages the setting and atmosphere, as these references feel completely out of place in this fantastical cartoon world; do the Spice Girls exist in the world of Chicken Little? Clearly, they must, which raises a lot of weird questions, makes no sense and, most importantly, severely dates the movie, in a way that classic and timeless Disney films like Bambi and Beauty and the Beast will never be. As well as relying too much on pop-culture references, the film’s sense of humour is just kind of nasty and mean-spirited, I’ll get into this more later when I talk about the characters, but so many of the film’s jokes come from making fun of Chicken Little and his friends and making them feel pathetic; it doesn’t feel like laughing with them, either, it genuinely feels like the writers are pointing and laughing at the unpopular heroes and encouraging you to join in and that’s something that absolutely doesn’t belong in a Disney movie.

The story and pacing are all over the place; the first five or so minutes introduce the initial conflict, that Chicken Little claims the sky is falling and no-one believes him, turning him into a laughing stock within the town. However, the next twenty-five minutes, which show Chicken Little’s attempts to regain popularity by becoming a baseball star, end up being almost completely inconsequential; half an hour in, when Chicken Little wins the big game and becomes the town hero, feels like the climax of an ordinary movie, but Chicken Littlejust keeps on going, with an entirely different plot about an alien invasion that comes out of nowhere. It quickly becomes very clear that the writers of this film had no idea how to adapt their initial concept into a full-length feature, so they just tack this story aboutChicken Little playing baseball on to fill up time; even within this sub-plot, there are a number of montages, to fill even more time, displaying how hollow the central idea forChicken Little really is, it feels so much more at home as a short than a full-length feature.

Having never seen Chicken Little before now, I perhaps spoke a little prematurely last week when I said that Home on the Range’s cast is the most hateful in Disney history, as this one is truly reprehensible. The townspeople of Oakey Oaks are like those of Springfield in The Simpsons, constantly complaining, blaming others for their problems, scapegoating people, forming angry mobs or mass panic over trivial issues and generally just acting selfish and mean towards their fellow man. However, Chicken Little lacks any of the subtle irony, intellect or sense of humour necessary to make such an idea work without things becoming too cruel and to be honest, even if it did, I still don’t know that it should have; this isn’t The Simpsons, or South Park, it’s a kids’ movie and a Disney movie at that! Why are all these characters, who aren’t villains, but just normal people, so cruel and spiteful, especially towards Chicken Little, who they constantly treat like garbage? This is yet another one of the film’s attempts to be less like classic Disney, with darker and edgier humour and characterisation, but these characters are just TOO mean; it’s not funny, it’s sad. 

Chicken Little himself is the standard Disney hero archetype, a nice, ordinary guy who finds he has potential for great things, but with little else to him; there’s not much more to really say. Chicken Little’s father, Buck, is AWFUL; he’s embarrassed and completely unsupportive of his son and never defends him from the cruel mockery of the townspeople, repeatedly refusing to believe Chicken Little and clearly showing that the doesn’t care for the kind of person his son has grown into. Yes, he has character development and realises that he was wrong not to trust his son and to appreciate him for who he is, but he just starts off too gutless and distant to ever really redeem himself; the way he constantly puts his son down and shows disappointment in him is just depressing to watch and adds to the entirely negative attitude of the film. I almost admire Disney’s choice to tackle a difficult father-son relationship and to admit that family units are rarely perfect and often require hard work and communication, but that kind of storyline belongs in a much more mature and intelligent movie than this. Abby Mallard is the most generic female sidekick of all time – she’s smarter and more sensitive than the male characters, has a crush on the hero and exists to be his support and eventual love interest, that’s it; she and everything she represents is lazy and insulting. Runt is so annoying, he’s dumb and fat, that’s basically it, are you sensing a pattern here? They make the same gag with him over and over again and it’s never funny, he’s worthless. The alien characters are, admittedly, not too bad, with some interesting designs and a somewhat humorous dynamic, but they are not around nearly long enough to help the movie out in the long run. Some of these characters are just boring, most of them are despicable; I don’t want to see Chicken Little win the approval of these people like in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, they don’t deserve it, I want to see the aliens vaporise them permanently, they’re horrible.

Like the last few Disney movies, Chicken Little employs standalone songs which play over the action rather than traditional musical numbers and if I wasn’t over it in Home on the Range (I was) then I am definitely over it now; so rarely does this idea work, I don’t understand why Disney did it so many times. They didn’t want to do musicals anymore? Fine, don’t do them, but why do this half-way bullshit, pick one or the other; instead, we have to listen to a number of laughably cookie cutter pop songs which have nothing to do with anything and are just there to waste time. Also, as I mentioned already, the film repeatedly inserts existing pop music, sometimes for a stupid joke but sometimes, again, JUST TO WASTE TIME; there is a scene where, for literally no reason whatsoever, Chicken Little’s friends sing karaoke to “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls. Why!? It has no bearing on what’s going on, no relation to the characters or the setting, no lyrical themes which reflect similar ones in the movie, it’s not even a good song! I honestly can’t even wrap my brain around these decisions, even when the songs are marginally better they do more harm than good; at the end of the movie they play “Aint’ no Mountain High Enough”, but that just made me think that I’d rather be watching Bridget Jones’ Diary than this – AND THAT’S SAYING SOMETHING.

Chicken Little is a film that’s as ugly on the inside as it is on the outside; it is mean-spirited, childish, disrespectful and lazy with a completely unwarranted sense of arrogance and complacency. If I had a gun to my head and had to say one nice thing about the film, it’d be that it gets a little more tolerable towards the end, but really, not by very much. None of the jokes feel genuine, it is clear that none of the writers actually cared about making people laugh, they just wanted to copy DreamWorks as much as they possibly could. The cast is fantastically unlikeable, the story utterly pointless, the music not even worth discussing and the animation impressively bad for a Disney movie; appropriate, considering that this film in no way feels like a Disney movie – not in style or tone, not in presentation, not in the amount of effort or care put in and not in attitude, as the film completely shits on its own company and its history of far, far superior movies that exist in an entirely different solar system of quality. That Chicken Little has the balls to make fun of The Lion King and Pinocchio is laughably pathetic and misguided; it’s like watching a 2ft quadruped threaten to beat up Mike Tyson, or that time Uwe Boll said thatPostal would make more money in its opening weekend than Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull – all you can do is laugh. While I freely admit I’ve yet to seeMeet the Robinsons or Bolt and Big Hero 6 has yet to be released, I find it very hard to believe that any of them will be as bad as this; Chicken Little constantly shouts about how new and interesting it is, but like its title character, nobody is buying what it has to say. 

1/10