Dir. Mark Dindal, US, 2005, 81 mins
Cast (Voices): Zach Braff, Garry Marshall, Don Knotts, Patrick Stewart, Amy Sedaris
Review by Matthew Rodgers
Do you remember the childhood story of Chicken Licken? The young fowl that believed the sky was falling down, and due to his youthful naivety was led to a tragic end by Foxy Loxy. It appears that Disney doesn't. The MouseHouses' first PIXAR-free CGI outing has a very tenuous link to that morality tale and it suffers because of it.
The slight plot centres on the young feathered hero voiced by Zach Braff(of Scrubs fame) who is convinced that the sky is falling in, so much so that he has his small town in hysterics, embarrassing his father and earning a reputation as a loser in the process. His fortunes change when he luckily wins the local baseball match against all the odds only to have his world fall apart when the sky falling is revealed to be the work of aliens. It sounds like a plot concocted in the imagination of the obvious target audience of pre-teens, but to say that would be doing them an injustice.
The shell of this egg of a movie is the obvious appeal of seeing crisp clear animation advanced from recent CGI smashes Madagascar and The Incredibles. Unfortunately the standard is very rarely above that of a cheap Saturday morning children’s television show, with a very unrealistic sheen that won't trouble the children but doesn’t allow the emotional investment achieved by Pixar and Co.
The insides of the egg are decidedly rotten. The Looney Tunes approach of exaggerated slapstick that worked so well in Madagascar are often forced in Chicken Little and unravelled at a pace that doesn’t allow any plot to develop. When the story does require any empathy from the audience, instead of using character development and strongly scripted dialogue the filmmakers resort to using cringe worthy songs to convey the young hero’s emotional state. A lazy, and especially for the target audience, boring, method of storytelling.
Chicken Little’s few highlights come courtesy of some post-modern in-jokes that although funny are also very dated (the Indiana Jones reference is about ten years too late and The Simpsons have done it better).
In a world in which Finding Nemo and Shrek are the respective kings of the cartoon world, perched proudly on Cloud 9, the sky has certainly fallen in on Chicken Little.
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