Chicken Little (2005)

Film: Chicken Little (2005)
Stars: Zach Braff, Joan Cusack, Steve Zahn, Garry Marshall, Don Knotts
Director: Mark Dindal
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

As I mentioned last week, despite having more-pressing movie-watching problems I could be doing (like, say, getting the OVP to a milestone number in the next few weeks that I've been shooting for for years), I am for some reason going through the B-Catalog of Disney's 58 Animated Feature Films, perhaps sending off this list first in a time of great chaos.  After all, what's better than cozying up with the Mouse House pictures while trying to stay inside at any cost (social distance yourself people-it's the only way we get out of this, and the more often you break, the longer this goes on)?  So I have been catching some truly random movies from Disney's catalog, mostly trying to polish through the Aughts, arguably Disney's lowest creative period, to see if there are perhaps some hidden gems before the studio rebounded with The Princess and the Frog.  While I still have a couple of titles left, rest assured that Chicken Little is not one of those "hidden gems."

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Chicken Little (Braff) a rooster who is known for his crazy theories that the sky is falling, which caused a town panic a year prior to most of the events of the picture.  He has a respected father who used to be a baseball star, Ace (Marshall), with whom he has a tense relationship, and has some cooky friends like Abby Mallard (Cusack), an "Ugly Duckling" with whom they both have a secret crush, and Runt of the Litter (Zahn), a big pig whose size is used as a bit of a joke against him (his pig relatives are much bigger than him, even though he is large compared to his poultry pals).  Of course, when Chicken Little and his friends are the only people to see alien invaders, and understand their mission on the planet, no one believes them, and so they are forced to save the day for the townspeople who misjudge them & thus eventually be considered heroes.

This is all fairly-standard Disney fare.  A plucky animal hero who must overcome the odds and show that our differences should be celebrated, and we are better as a unit...this is the plot of dozens of other classic films from Dumbo to Frozen.  So why is Chicken Little so heinous?  It starts with the comedy.  The film is reliant on pop culture gags that feel more at-home in the Shrek franchise than in a Disney classic (fifteen years later, almost all of these gags fall flat).  Timeless stories (and surely the tale of "Chicken Little," which goes back at least two centuries, would qualify under that umbrella) shouldn't need you to insert a lot of modern references that will age the film horribly, and honestly wouldn't have been that funny at the time.  Movies are better as a timeless medium, and this movie aged particularly badly by investing in such measures.

But that alone doesn't sink it.  The characters are two-dimensional (literally and figuratively), with everyone stuck in the same trope for the whole of the movie, leaning into their lack of depth for jokes.  Even someone as gifted as Joan Cusack can't find a way to make this movie sparkle (she's funnier at the Oscars presenting than she is in the entirety of Chicken Little).  It's hard to see the film as anything more than a Shrek knockoff even when it comes to the non-pop culture humor, reliant on body humor & stereotypes for easy, vacant comedy.

But worst of all-it's a really ugly movie.  This was Disney's first fully-computer animated movie (Dinosaur, which we'll get to sometime in April, was both live-action and computer-animated), and it shows.  The sequences read more like what you'd expect from an animated kids show on morning cable than something timeless from Disney.  It'd be easy to call this growing pains, but compare it to what kid brother Pixar was doing with computer animation, and you have to just say Disney whiffed. At this point Pixar had already made the beautiful Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo, and Cars was about to wrap (say what you will about the movie, which is one of Pixar's bigger story whiffs, but the naturalism in the landscapes is glorious).  Chicken Little can't compete-when Madagascar (also out in 2005) is a better motif than you've created, you've done something wrong.