Chicken Little

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.