Chicken Little Review: Disney Marathon

Spoilers

Let me take you back to 2005. You’re a Disney fan waiting to see what Disney does next. Disney hasn’t made a movie everyone loved since 2002 with Lilo & Stitch and every other animation studio were making classics at the time. Both Pixar and DreamWorks had created a classic only a year prior, with Pixar releasing the Incredibles and DreamWorks creating Shrek 2. But hey, Disney were moving away from hand drawn movies in favour of CGI movies which seemed to be working for everyone else. Disney then unironically presents to you Chicken Little. You sit there waiting for them to tell you that they’re kidding. Nope this is all you get. Many people regard Chicken Little as the worst Disney Classic. I disagree, it’s the third worst Disney Classic. As per usual I’m going to give Chicken Little a fair chance, there are some movies nobody likes that I love, and movies everyone loves that I think are overrated. And I did enjoy Chicken Little as a child so maybe it’s not terrible. Right?

Chicken Little is an ‘adaption’ of the classic European folk tale called “Henny Penny”. America took this folk tale and called it Chicken Little or even sometimes Chicken Licken (which is the most American thing ever). To call this movie an adaption would be a stretch though. Disney loves doing this, they get the rights to an old story, make a movie that is barely related to it and calls it an adaption. Are Disney scared at the idea of being called original? Let’s go through that plot shall we and then I’ll discuss the movie as a whole.

The movie starts with Chicken Little ringing a bell and telling everybody to run. This causes a mass panic around the town until someone asks Chicken Little what is wrong. He replies that the sky is falling so obviously nobody believes him. He can’t find the piece of the sky that fell on him either so his father Buck Cluck assumes that it was just an acorn.

I know this isn’t relevant but why is Chicken Little called that? Surely, he’d be called Chicken Cluck? His parents are called Buck Cluck and Chloe Cluck so why has he got a weird last name? Also why is he named Chicken? It’d be like you being called Human. Some people say his real name is Ace Cluck but I don’t know where that came from. Is it because of Ace at the end of the movie? I always assumed that was a joke that the name Chicken Little wasn’t ‘Hollywood’ enough so they straight up changed his name in his movie adaption. If his real name is Chicken Little than it sure would be weird if he ended up being tall. Yes, I just spent a paragraph talking about the name of the movies protagonist but this question has haunted me and I need to know the truth. Please tell me.

Anyway, we skip forward a year and I do find it kind of funny how nobody has forgotten the incident. Chicken Little merchandise is being sold everywhere and they’re making a movie adaption of the incident. The pure ridiculousness of the situation is pretty amusing. The chad Buck Cluck is embarrassed by his virgin son and drops him off to go catch the bus. I don’t know why he doesn’t drive him to school, I think they mentioned why but I’m not going to rewatch Chicken Little to find out. I already had to keep looking out of my window to make sure nobody outside saw I was watching Chicken Little the first time. A pretty entertaining scene plays of Chicken Little running to school. I like it how he uses his smarts to navigate a world that both hates him and wasn’t designed for someone as small as him (don’t worry I don’t have much more nice things to say about this movie).

In school we meet Chicken Little’s friends Abby Mallard, Runt of the Litter, and Fish out of Water. I’ll talk about them in detail after the plot summary. In a dodgeball game we meet who I guess is sort of the antagonist, Foxy Loxy. Foxy Loxy is the worst designed character in any animated movie I’ve ever seen. That isn’t an exaggeration.

She could have the best personality of any character and I would still want to set her on fire. Luckily, we are meant to hate her because I don’t think I could feel anything else towards Foxy Loxy. Anyway, Foxy Loxy and her friends beat the shit out of Chicken Little and throw him into a fire alarm and of course Chicken Little is blamed for this. His dad picks him up and he seems to beyond disappointed, so disappointed that he has lost all hope of ever being proud of his son so he doesn’t even tell him off. Chicken Little wants his father to be proud of him so joins the baseball team. Eventually with enough training he ends up winning a game against another school and is regarded as a hero. Everyone has now forgotten of Chicken Little’s past and now love him.

Buck Cluck is now proud of his son. Chicken Little is looking out to the sky when a piece of the sky falls on him. Now what he should do is show his dad so he understands that his son was never crazy, instead he hides it from his father and shows his friends. Fish out of Water stands on the piece of the sky and it flies into the air so they all chase after him. They find a UFO and all enter it where they find an orange alien called Kirby who follows them. They find Fish out of Water behind an x-ray in a scene that really used to scare me as a child. They find a charter with all the planets in the solar system with the ones next to Earth crossed off and Earth circled which they take as the aliens planning on destroying the planet. Some robots encounter and chase them, the aliens chase them through the town where Chicken Little rings the bell and says that aliens are invading. Everyone can predict what happens here. Nobody sees any of the aliens because they all leave on the UFO too quickly and everyone thinks Chicken Little is lying again, making him lose any of the good reputation the baseball game gained him. This is predictable but they don’t even really use this for much more conflict. We don’t even get to see the town properly hating Chicken Little again as the next morning the aliens invade and everyone realises that Chicken Little was right.

Chicken Little realises that they just want Kirby back because he’s their child. Why was their child in some random device in a hallway and not with his parents when they found him on the ship? Chicken Little tells his dad that he needs to trust him and they need to get Kirby back to his parents. Runt of the Litter says the worst line in the entire movie (the movie hasn’t got a good script by the way so it’s pretty hard to be the worst line in the movie) “Mr. Cluck! Wait! He’s telling the truth! Given his track record, we understand why you don’t believe him”. Who wrote this line? The whole point of the movie is that Chicken Little was always telling the truth and everyone knows he’s been telling the truth now so what does this mean? Apparently, Runt of the Litters wise words convinced Buck Cluck to help Chicken Little. They have a father-son moment at one point, Chicken Little and Abby Mallard kiss and they get to the UFO. After some arguing with the aliens they agree to let everyone they’ve stolen go. The aliens have been using lasers to steal people, I forgot to mention that. Everyone is cool again and the aliens explain that the charter was actually talking about planets that had acorns on them and not planets they’ve destroyed. Foxy Loxy gets transported but her mind gets scrambled and Runt of the Litter is like “leave her like this I like it”, he then starts dating her. What? Basically, Foxy Loxy has lost their mind and Runt of the Litter just takes advantage of her and we’re meant to be cool with this. Like I hate Foxy Loxy but come on.

We cut forward a bit and we see the Hollywood adaption of the story which I found pretty funny. They have some pretty clever jabs at how Hollywood exaggerates real life events such as making Abby overly sexualised, everyone else super masculine, and making the aliens just straight up evil, instead of giving them other motives that aren’t to take over the world. So that was Chicken Little. Did I like it? No. God no, it’s really bad. I’m not sure if the plot summary got that across too well as most of the problems aren’t specific to singular scenes but are ongoing throughout the majority of the movie or at least happen frequently, so they won’t be mentioned in a plot summary, they’ll be mentioned now. Are you ready for me to complain about Chicken Little for a few more paragraphs?

Chicken Little is confused on a thematic level. The original story that this movie was based on had a few different endings which changed the message of the story. The most common messages were not to lie and not to jump to conclusions. In the original story it was an acorn that fell on Chicken Little / Henny Penny’s head and they said it was the sky causing mass panic. In this adaptation it actually was the sky that fell on Chicken Little’s head so he wasn’t lying and the hysteria he caused wasn’t unwarranted, losing the message of the original piece. So, it has to come up with its own themes and messages. The entire sauce of conflict from the original story isn’t adapted to have a new message. You could argue that the message is to trust your friends and family but if that’s the case it’s a dangerous lesson to teach. You don’t blame anyone for not believing Chicken Little, the movie isn’t telling you they are in the wrong so I’d say the message isn’t to believe your friends and family blindly. In fact, I’d say no deeper meaning exist within the central conflict of the falling sky. Instead the themes are clumsily slapped onto the father son subplot. The message of the movie is a simple, be nice to your dad / son. This random message that is unrelated to the rest of the movie is just thrown in there. I guess the message is also to just talk to loved ones about your problems which is a good message but it is so separate from the rest of the movie that it seems tacked on. We spend a lot more time with Chicken Little’s friends than with his father. To make a theme really powerful the movie has to revolve around it, it can’t just be thrown in there and be expected to still be poignant. So, the movie has a theme that doesn’t really make an effort due to how forced it feels, a movie doesn’t have to have a deep meaning to be good though, Chicken Little is clearly trying to be a comedy and not much else which can work. The problem is you have to be funny for that to work.

Chicken Little isn’t funny. I know comedy is subjective and I’ve got a really weird sense of humour but I’ve never encountered anyone who finds Chicken Little funny so I’m clearly not alone in thinking the movies not funny. One of the main problems with the humour in this movie is that it is constantly repeated, the jokes aren’t funny anyway and are even less funny when they are repeated one hundred times. One of the repeated jokes is Chicken Little saying “what are we talking about” when he wants to get out of a conversation. It wasn’t funny the first time and definitely isn’t after they’ve said it half a dozen times. Morkubine Porcupine isn’t just the worst name ever used in a movie; he is also ridiculously unfunny. His one joke is that the camera zooms in on him and he says one word. Disney seemed to find him fucking hilarious as he’s in every promotion for the movie even though he’s a small part of it. We also get a lot of jokes that are very mean spirited. Chicken Little is constantly attacked and hated on by everyone to the point where it’s not funny. Slapstick works but not when its 20 minutes of a character just getting beaten up. Imagine if after Bug Bunny pranked Daffy Duck, he just started to beat the shit out of him for 20 minutes. That’s what Chicken Little feels like. They also make a joke about Runt of the Litter having a panic attack. Yikes. They have plenty of burp jokes, which aren’t funny. Ok, so you can’t enjoy it on a thematic level, it’s not funny, at least Disney movies look good, right?

Chicken Little is the ugliest Disney Classic. This movie was outdated visually when it released. Both DreamWorks and especially Pixar had made great looking CGI movies at this point. Disney didn’t get good looking CGI down until two movies later with Bolt. You could argue that this was Disney’s first fully CGI movie. Granted but they should have realised their limitations then. Pixar knew their limitations when they started and made a movie about toys because they can easily be made to look good with CGI. Disney made a shit looking movie, if they weren’t confident making various different animals not look like shit, than they should have tried a different concept until they had mastered the art. Also, Pixar created the CGI movie, at the point of Chicken Little’s release hundreds of CGI movies existed for Disney to study and there was CGI experts that they could have learnt from. If someone joins an industry you can’t defend them because they are at the level another company was at years ago, the companies don’t exist in a vacuum. Ok, but the characters, they’re good, right? No.

Let’s start with the four characters we spend the majority of the movie with, Chicken Little, Abby Millard, Runt of the Litter, and Fish Out of Water. Chicken Little is the protagonist of the movie and is likeable enough. He acts like a young child (which he is, so you know well done Disney), he’s smart without that being his only character trait, is friendly, yeah, I like him enough. The problem is every other character. Abby Millard exists to get Chicken Little to talk to his dad which is a good message, it teaches kids to be more open with friends and family which is a healthy thing to do. She’s also Chicken Little’s love interest. It’s just such a cliché, the sensible girl to the more adventurous boy, if she had more to her character it’d be fine, but that’s all she is. Runt of the Litter is just there as the comic relief I guess but he isn’t funny. He has three jokes, he loves singing which apparently we’re meant to find funny, he’s fat (not funny), and he has panic attacks (definitely not funny). Fish Out of Water hasn’t got a character, he doesn’t speak or really emote much, to be honest I don’t really know his deal. Chicken Little is the only character I like out of the main cast of four characters which is pretty pathetic. Let’s talk about Buck Cluck (never thought I’d write that sentence in my life). He’s Chicken Little’s dad and his arc is to learn to not be embarrassed by his son. The problem is that it’s played as a joke which makes it appear that he’s only acting and hasn’t truly learnt anything, he hasn’t learnt to trust his son and is only really proud of him once he stops an alien invasion. So yeah Buck Cluck isn’t going to win any dad of the year awards.

So yeah Chicken Little fails at everything, it has nothing interesting to say, it’s not funny, it looks like shit, and none of the characters other than the protagonist are decent. It has some half decent moments but they’re buried in so much shit that they barely even matter. Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing Meet the Robinsons. Thanks for reading.

2 / 10