Cartoon Corner- Chicken Little

So I watched this a couple days ago and mostly forgot it.  Rather than do the simple thing of watching it again, I think writing things out to remember them will more accurately capture what this movie is about.  Chicken Little is in the running for worst film of the Disney Animation Studios canon, and while the other two most-cited contenders aren’t movies I’ve seen, that’s definitely a fair statement.  And the reasons why it fails are best illustrated by this lack of memorability.

The problems start immediately, with the movie rapidly flipping through several Disney fairy tale opening options, calling each cliché.  Aside from being a cliché itself even in 2005 thanks to Dreamworks, you’re priming your audience to require subversion; reminding people there’s nothing new under the sun means you need to surprise them much more than something that makes no such pretense.  The truly damning thing is this isn’t the tone of the movie at all.  It’s a little weird, and the contemporary setting is even now rare for Disney films, but fundamentally it isn’t trying to subvert children’s fables, it’s stretching desperately to make one fill 90 minutes (and coming up short even then).

From there the opening act sets up the apparent core conflict, with Chicken Little’s panicked declaration that the sky is falling falling on deaf ears, including those of his father, whose only goal in life is seemingly to pass through it entirely unnoticed.  A better movie might have turned this into a scathing critique of political and moral apathy, but instead it later chooses to be a Disney movie about family reconciliation. Like… Dad whose name I won’t dignify by looking up, the problem wasn’t that you have no faith in your son, it’s that you have no faith in anything!  Rather than pay the slightest attention to what’s going on in your world, you heard someone speaking out of turn and scolded them to calm down, because anything that draws attention to yourself is automatically bad.  That’s a much deeper problem that having a heart-to-heart 10 minutes before credits roll doesn’t fix.

But even knowing it doesn’t go anywhere, and setting aside that the storybook opening has already ruined the movie’s tone, this could still have worked.  But then the movie tortures logic for a while.  Chicken Little is scared to confront his dad (sure), so he figures the better solution is to win the town’s trust (…okay).  And the best path to do that is to become a town hero (losing the plot here), so he’ll become the start player of the local baseball team.  At this point I’m pretty sure the actual problem of the movie is they wanted desperately to satirize American culture but weren’t good enough writers to actually SAY anything.  The reasoning in the movie seems to be “people will listen to anything a celebrity says, therefore all I have to do is become the best baseball player in town and I win!”  And if it was something Chicken Little wanted to do for other reasons, or had the slightest previous skill in, or wasn’t specifically designed so it would take a miracle for this plan to work, or even if the plan completely failed and he had to come up with something that he was legitimately good at instead, all of those are better story ideas that could give it thematic heft.  Instead it’s basically a way to revert the movie world to the status quo it had before the opening scene, except it wastes 20 minutes of screen time and steals the spotlight from a young tomboy.  That part comes back.

So.  We’re back to square one, and so Chicken Little manages to stumble upon the original cause of the invisible thing that hit his head.  Drumroll please!

Yup.  There was an invisible spaceship, they left behind their kid, and now they think he’s been kidnapped and they’ll wipe the town off the map looking for him.  It’s all a big misunderstanding and all Chicken Little has to do to save the day is be honest and get people to believe him!

Okay, so I guess it’s slightly unfair to say there’s no subversion here.  The entire thing does turn the moral of the original fairy tale on its head.  But that’s not the same thing as Shrek-style subversion, and it doesn’t really work even in the context of the story, because it’s not a gradual learning curve, he just tries the same thing repeatedly until accidental evidence is finally dumped on his lap in such quantities people finally listen.  And the whole thing is so padded and diluted that even that tiny thread of thematic thrust doesn’t really do anything.

And that’s the thing.  Nothing in this movie has any emotional weight.  The character models are notably ugly, which doesn’t help with garnering accidental empathy, but that’s the problem.  Any caring for the story or characters here would have to be carried by the physical acting because nothing in the story gives it space or detail to generate that response.  The cast is a bunch of comedy sidekicks not provided any good jokes, no one’s given the dramatic pathos to be effective, there’s no clear reasoning for the town’s hostility to Chicken Little in the first place even, which mostly matters because it seems pretty clear he was already a bit of an outcast before the opening scene but we never get to see it in action.  The only character I actually felt bad for was Foxy Loxy, because being brainwashed into a girly girl sits just that badly with me on principle.  Apparently there’s a scene I didn’t even notice where she actually bullies the main character, but considering the entire movie is bullying him for the crime of existing I probably wouldn’t have noticed even if I hadn’t completely checked out of caring by then.

Rating- 4/10.  As much as I’m ragging on it, the thing is it doesn’t manage to be actively offensive.  It’s just… nothing.  A flailing thing that leaves no impact at all.