Latest Disney hit has Little value

November 14, 2005 —

Before anyone goes to see Chicken Little, heed this warning: of all the Disney computer-animated features to date, this one is most fitting of the term "children's movie." Unfortunately, it also wins the award for least entertaining. In other words, The Incredibles this is not.

The movie starts out on a humorous note, as it tries to avoid cliche openings such as "Once upon a time..." and the old "open up the storybook and here is our movie" beginning. However, it quickly falls in terms of humor and originality. Ironically, the movie does not even attempt to avoid overused jokes and situations, instead recycling some of the material that probably cropped up years ago in Monsters, Inc.

The movie even goes so far as to use the fat guy gets stuck in a little hole while trying to escape routine, only this time the fat guy is a fat pig named Runt of the Litter. Yes, that is supposed to be funny. Only it is not, much like the rest of the movie.

To give an indication of just how much this movie is lacking in humor, I watched Chicken Little while sitting in an audience composed of children eight and under, and the theater was more silent than a graduation speech at mime school. Heck, even that joke is funnier than most of Chicken Little.

But to make matters worse, the characters in the movie are just plain ugly. Aside from Chicken Little himself and a few others, the residents of Oakey Oaks just look amateurish compared to characters from previous Pixar hits. The reason for this is that Chicken Little is the first big non-Pixar computer-generated movie for Disney. It is almost like the new animators realized this movie was doomed from the start, so why put the extra effort into it?

But even this would be forgivable if the storyline had been strong enough to keep my interest. Of course, it was not. And there is just no excuse for me to be bored by a movie that seems to be barely an hour long.

The whole focus of the movie is not even on alien invasion, like previews would indicate. Rather, the movie is about Chicken Little trying to work on his relationship with his father after the embarrassing incident in which the young chick shouts to the town, "The sky is falling!"

Nobody believes Chicken Little when he talks about a piece of the sky hitting him on the head, and nobody believes him when he says that aliens are invading earth - not even his own father. So Abby Mallard tries to give advice to Chicken Little on closure, a concept I am sure every eight year old can fully comprehend.

So I guess that means the creators were thinking about the adult audience, too. But unlike Shrek, which offered adults outrageous jokes that children just would not catch, Chicken Little presents the older people in the audience with the complex and boring intricacies of the plotline.

And just to add insult to injury, the list of actors that did voiceovers for Chicken Little is a who's who of animated comedy: Family Guy mainstays Patrick Warburton and Adam West, American Dad! regular Patrick Stewart, The Simpsons' Harry Shearer. Heck, even the great Fred Willard appears as one of the aliens. So many great names with so little to show for it all.

There was a lot of potential in this movie, but ultimately the project comes up short. You might just want to wait until this one falls from the sky and into video stores.