Disney Countdown #50: Chicken Little (2005)

In 2001, Shrek became the movie that everyone and their mother wanted to imitate. With its unprecedented success at the box office, a sort of cult was spawned in which everyone wanted to be as quippy and smart as Shrek had been. This desire to emulate that style continued on for a long time—far longer than it really should have—and Disney was no exception to the rule. So in 2005, they released their first-ever fully CG picture entitled Chicken Little about a chicken who, after an initial embarrassment years prior to the start of the movie in which he is duped into thinking the sky is falling, finds himself a social outcast who only wishes to achieve the approval of his father and find his place in society. It's loosely based off of the fable "The Sky is Falling," but only bears vague resemblance to its predecessor--namely with the idea of the sky falling and the rhyming names, such as Foxy Loxy.

After Disney decided to shut their 2-D doors, solidified by the failure of Home on the Range at the box office, this movie was to be a hip, new, exciting edition to their cannon that would pull them out of the slump of mediocrity and into the spotlight once again.

Well…it pulled them out of mediocrity. Right into abject failure.

While I have to admit that my disdain for Home on the Range is more or less a personal preference, this movie received the same kind of vitriolic hatred that is reserved for things like Dragonball: Evolution, at least from the fans of Disney animation. It was a miserable disappointment in the box office, garnering only $135 million—not even enough to cover its $150 million budget. People seemed to look at this movie—and still do—with a blend of confusion, repulsion, and amazement. How could something that was supposed to be the start of a new era for Disney fall so flat?

There are legitimate reasons for the complaints. As I mentioned above, the itching to imitate Shrek became an ugly force, and with Disney doing a pretty crappy job in the last decade or so of bringing people in to see their movies, they more than likely assumed that a movie chock-full of pop-culture references and bizarre in-jokes would be their ticket to success.

And you know what, I will concede that there are few things in here that are funny and interesting. They did take advantage of the world that they employed, at least in terms of design. They took a lot of new steps in directions that they hadn’t previously gone. The problem is nothing in this movie really jives. The design of the characters, the backgrounds, the script…it all feels so strange and out-of-place that my initial reaction as a twelve year-old was “well…that was weird.”

But looking at this now, holy moly is this film a mess.

First of all, the plot in this movie, while creative on one hand, is convoluted and all over the place on the other. You’ve got Chicken Little who is convinced one day that the sky is falling and makes a complete mockery of himself but running around the town and trying to warn every one of their imminent doom. He eventually moves beyond that and lives a relatively normal life with his dad who seems to forget that his son exists (in typical Disney fashion, the mother is dead). Until, that is, the day it happens again—a piece of the sky falls down to earth and right where Chicken Little lives. Then, it’s up to him and his friends to figure out why, stop it from happening, and consequently save his town.

I say that it’s creative because they had a lot of things they could do with a storyline like this. Unfortunately, the way they chose to take it was a disaster. It’s one of those movies where you go into it thinking it’s one thing and then it ends up being another. Very much like Super 8—you think it’s a movie about a bunch of kids wanting to solve a mystery about a train accident that they caught on tape and then find out that it’s actually about aliens. Except, you know, it actually kind of worked in Super 8.

Here you’ve got a bunch of clichés, boring characters, and plot twists that don’t make any sense.

And speaking of characters, let’s talk about the animation. I really, really don’t like it. I didn’t even care for it at twelve years old. Since this was the first fully-CG feature that Disney worked on solo, I want to cut it some slack…but I just can’t. While the textures are great on some of the animals (mainly the ones with fur), the way they are drawn is just…gross. Everything is so weirdly proportioned, with giant heads that could never be supported by the bodies that carry them, Abby Mallard is one of the most appallingly hideous designs in the history of animation period, and Runt has a strange tendency to look like rubber. The fish out of water gag is kind of clever, but the fish is also the size of Chicken Little, despite the fact that he is a goldfish by design. And these aren’t the result of the computers that constructed the characters—that fault is on the artists and designers who decided “Yeah, let’s make every animal in this movie the exact same proportions even though one could be a dog and the other a sheep.” So I can’t cut it the slack I want to because the problems run far deeper than just the technology used to create the movie.

If you look at the backgrounds, there’s a very distinct cartoony feel to them: the buildings are curved and stylized, there are a lot of saturated earth tones, and you just never get the impression that this world is real. Yet they opted for a more realistic style for the animals that clashes with the backgrounds in a very bad way.

The writing for this movie tries so hard to be Shrek and it just isn’t. All of the pop-culture references, emphasis on Chicken Little’s traditional “nerdiness” is so over-done, and none of the characters are anything more than stock (with maybe exception of CL in a very shallow sense). The plot twist of the aliens is so…gah, just WEIRD. They’re not even very creative, although I guess they do a good job making the baby one look fluffy and…kind of cute.

In the end, I just feel like this movie is underdeveloped and tries too hard to be impressive that we lose any real charm or interest in what’s going on. Unless you really like Disney animation, chickens, or CGI, I’d personally skip this one.

Fun Facts

The original plans were to have the beginning of this film, telling the establishing story of Chicken Little and the acorn, in traditional ("hand-drawn") animation. Don Knotts, who supplied the voice of Turkey Lurkey, the town Mayor, recorded the voice track as the narrator for this sequence. The idea was abandoned and that part of the story was refashioned as a main part of the film and done in computer animation

Holly Hunter was considered for the role of Abby Mallard.

The first fully computer generated feature film produced in-house by Disney.

Editor Dan Molina performed the "voice" of Fish Out of Water by vocalizing through a tube into a water cooler tank full of water.

Michael J. Fox, Matthew Broderick and David Spade were considered for the role of Chicken Little.