Chicken Little Reviews

Coming from Disney, it's shoking that the design, color, ilumination and design is so terrible, with 3D films like Toy Story having aged better with an almost 10 year gap.

The plot is kind of like it doesn't know what it wants to do, where it wants to go, so at the end of the movie it's not clear what the point or conclusion was, wrapped up with terrible characters everywhere, leaving only Chicken Little and his father as two merely "ok" characters.

Now I really wanted to like this film. I adore Disney, but along with Home on the Range and The Wild for various reasons it is my least favourite Disney film. Home on the Range was forgettable save some good moments and The Wild while colourful had some derivative elements, but Chicken Little I feel suffered because it tried too hard. Granted, it is visually and technically accomplished, more in the backgrounds and colours than in the character designs. The animation is bright and colourful, though some of the character designs are rather forced at times. The film moves briskly, and it also does have a good idea and some above-decent voice work. However, because it tries so hard, elements get lost in the process. The film does have an uneven tone, and the storyline while trying to fit a lot in such as some references to pop culture and is unfocused unfortunately. Speaking of the pop culture references, sorry I think they are going to date, and the script was often very weak and the ending clichéd. Then there are the characters, I liked Mayor Turkey Lurkey and the title character was spirited enough, but others such as Abby Mallard verged on annoying or flimsy. I wasn't taken with the soundtrack overall either, it did have its nice spots but there are others where you are wondering what on earth? Some of it was very loud to the point it was almost intolerable. So all in all, it is spirited and tries hard, but on the whole sorry it didn't work for me. 4/10 Bethany Cox

Disney’s second try with Chicken Little is no more successful than the first, and at least that one had the good taste to be a short film. There’s just simply not enough story in Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes for feature-length animation. Chicken Little frequently feels engine-less, spurting around in every direction, and confuses pop-culture references and pop songs for emotional weight.

 

Whenever a children’s film shoehorns in a wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop songs, it always makes me worry. If done correctly, it can be charming, but it’s frequently used to hammer home the already obvious, beating jokes like a dead horse, and used as short-hand for character development when none is present. Chicken Little does this over and over and over again. An alien invasion is scored to R.E.M.’s alternative rock classic “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” a montage of Chicken Little trying to get to school is underlined by Barenaked Ladies “One Little Slip,” and the rest of it is just too depressing to continue mentioning.

 

It’s a shame that Chicken Little never coheres into anything worthwhile, as a few disparate parts work well enough on their own. The vocal cast is clearly game, and there’s not a lousy performance in the bunch. Zach Braff and Garry Marshall create a believable father-son dynamic, and there relationship is one of the brighter spots. The film never slows down long enough to develop it, but the potential was there.

 

A few gags land here and there, like the opening that has Marshall’s character doing voiceover narration wondering how to open the story. Two abandoned attempts poke fun at prior Disney films, and, much like Hercules, this is the sight of Disney eating its own tail. The final film-within-a-film is a nice gag about giving real stories of heroism and daring the Hollywood treatment, even if that punch doesn’t completely land given the film-by-committee vibe that pervades the entire running time. This is the film that proves if you threw enough random things at the audience, and never slow down for a minute, some things are bound to stick. It’s a step-up from Home on the Range, but only in the way that a stubbed toe hurts less than a broken one.

I already saw this movie but since it was a while back and since it was available on Disney+, I thought I might as well check it out again. Well, after this rewatch, to be honest, not only this movie turned out to be even more boring that I expected but I didn’t remember that the damned thing was also so ugly. Basically, for many decades, Disney had been pretty much untouchable in the animation genre. However, it has become a total different ball game nowadays. Indeed, the competition is huge and Disney was no longer at the top. They were lucky that they actually owned Pixar otherwise they would have been really in trouble. This movie is a good example about how dreadful the Disney features had become at some point. Seriously, how could you expect us to switch from such memorable characters like Snow White, Peter Pan, Dumbo, Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella, Cruella de Vil, Aladdin’s Genie to … Chicken Little?!? Even before the movie started, you already knew it would stink. What a pathetic character… The story was not much better as it was terribly generic, predictable and frankly quite tedious. In my opinion, their biggest mistake was to drop the hand-drawn animation and to do, just like everyone else, some CGI animation. That was a bad move since hand-drawn animation had been their specialty for decades and they should have stick to it. Eventually, since all their last efforts were flops (‘Home on the range’, ‘Brother Bear’, ‘Treasure Planet’, ‘Atlantis’), they decided to switch to CGI and this movie was their first attempt with this technique and, as I mentioned earlier, the end-result looked terrible, especially after so many years passed by. Anyway, to conclude, it is actually pretty weak and I don’t think it is really worth a look, except maybe if you have some very young children to entertain but, even in this case, there are so many better movies to watch with them.