Walt Disney, part LXIII: Make pishee

CHICKEN LITTLE

2005

Directed by Mark Dindal

Written by Steve Bencich, Ron J. Friedman, Ron Anderson, Mark Kennedy, and Mark Dindal

Spoilers: high

After 67 years, the studio that brought feature-length hand-drawn animation into existence was also its last bastion on this continent, and in a way this was an un-Disney thing to have done; after all, the studio had, by this point, spent most of those 67 years embracing every new technology that came along that would permit them to remove human handicraft from the equation, till it was something so distinct from "traditional" animation that I've never really liked the term applied to, e.g, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, even if it's useful.  But nevertheless, and without any special tribute, in 2004 WDFA released its final theatrically-released traditional animated feature made with its own technologies, Home On the Range.  It's a cartoon I like a great deal, but it represents no very dignified way to bury an art form.  For it had come to pass that, following the box office destruction of 2002's Treasure Planet, and other, previous disappointments, a decision had been made to begin winding up WDFA's far-flung empire, and soon—not even a decade after its expansion to every corner of the globe—WDFA was back to a single facility in Burbank, presently retasked for an entirely different kind of cartoon.  (DisneyToon Studios' various campuses persisted for several more years—hence feature-length traditional animation survived at Disney, too, albeit only in service to cash-grabbing DTV sequels.)  But this was the moment of Pixar's meteoric ascent—at the same time, DreamWorks was matching them, at least commercially—and both studios were in the business of beating the living hell out of Disney's old-fashioned cartoons at the box office thanks to the new hotness in animation, fully-rendered 3-D CGI.  Naturally, Disney's executives were consumed with envy at this development, and hatched hubristic schemes of vertical integration.  WDFA was committed to direct competition on DreamWorks' and Pixar's own ground.  Pixar's relationship with Disney—the latter had been the former's distributor since 1995's Toy Story—had never been an especially happy one, and in the early 21st century this relationship looked set to dissolve.  Obviously, the solution was that WDFA would become Disney's own CGI cartoon factory, and so, with David Stainton in charge, a "streamlined" WDFA set off on the adventure of making their first all-CGI film for 2005.

And, anyway, you know how this ends: Disney bought Pixar, with certain assurances about Disney animation's future made to Pixar chief John Lasseter, all of which were slightly too late to preserve WDFA as anything like its former self, and this is how the situation as it pertains today in 2025 came to be, with Disney operating two more-or-less co-equal animation studios that each more-or-less exclusively make CGI cartoons, and arguably increasingly-similar ones, at that.  Two decades on, anyone you talk to about this will still be sort of sad about it, and it does feel like a decision was perhaps made prematurely—it is true that traditional animation was being seriously outperformed in the early 21st century, and I don't think you can chalk that up solely to "yes, but it was all bad," because simply "making bad movies" didn't seem to have hurt DreamWorks's CGI efforts any.  Pixar maintaining such a high level of quality probably did lend the entire medium an unjustified prestige, however: I don't know if anyone's ever really figured out why traditional animation became so passe, though if I had to hazard a guess, it's that big-deal, visually-impressive, emotionally-powerful theatrical animation became associated in the American public's mind with the technology of CGI, and the technology of "traditional" animation with semi-disposable television comedy.  (I mean, it's got to say something that the single biggest 2-D hit of the entire 21st century, irrespective of nation of origin, isn't either of Disney's revival attempts, or a Shinkai film, it's The Simpsons Movie.)  In any event, it can kind of feel like traditional animation was sacrificed on the altar of a fad cycle, and then its human basis was scattered to the four winds: you can't just rebuild a nearly century-old industry in a day or a year, and even if you could, outside of Japan the form is now firmly associated with nostalgic hobbyist nonsense, and who would come?  There's a market, but that market simply isn't that big.

And that brings us to Chicken Little, Disney's very first all-CGI feature, which soaks up the vengeful disdain of the animation aficionado like a sponge, and not, in this case, all that unfairly.  It sure is a first try, all right, that unfortunately has the embarrassing status of still being a year younger than The Goddamn Incredibles, and while we'll definitely talk about how it looks, "how it looks" is arguably not even its biggest problem.  It shares a title with a Disney Golden Age short film, and not wholly coincidentally: the 1943 "Chicken Little" is eight minutes' worth of 2025 nausea, that takes the raw material of the fairy tale—the stupid little chicken who believes the sky to be falling, that one—and reimagines it as the scheme of an evil fox who finds a useful idiot in Chicken Little and, after a campaign of psychological warfare, convinces the entire animal population of a farm to put themselves in a position to be eaten by that selfsame fox, thereby affording it possibly the single cruelest ending I've ever seen in a cartoon of its era, including all Looney Tunes and Averies; the original plan for Chicken Little, the 2005 movie, as conceived by its director, no less a figure than The Emperor's New Groove's Mark Dindal, concerned a young hen who, due to her delusional claims of a falling sky, had been exiled to summer camp by her parents, whereupon she discovered the scheme of her camp counselor, an evil wolf, to inflict some manner of villainy upon her town, and she is naturally disbelieved, etc.  This got far enough into production that Holly Hunter recorded most or all of her dialogue for the young hen; but Michael Eisner, then still in power, at a minimum dictated that the female protagonist would be male, because of course he did.  I feel like there's plenty of indication, likewise, that the reorientation of Dindal's modest funny animal cartoon, perhaps a more appropriate training exercise for an inexperienced studio, into a science fiction actioner, also came from Eisner, or perhaps Stainton; it's a little insane to realize it when you line them up like I've done, but practically every blasted thing Disney was doing in the 00s had to have a sci-fi gloss.

We begin with a parody of Disney openings that explains less about the movie that's starting than it does the miserable shame that everybody at Disney had internalized after having their ass handed to them by DreamWorks' snarkfests.  But, afterwards, we arrive in Oakey Oaks, where lives Chicken Little (Zach Braff), whom we meet as he rings the school's bell, ranting about how the sky is (get this) falling.  He causes an outrageous panic, snowballing into what looks like a couple million dollars of damage (though it's a zany cartoon, so the economic impact isn't that important), and he is, of course, wrong; his humiliated father, Buck Cluck, apologizes on his behalf (dad being played by legendary sitcom impresario Garry Marshall, but yes, I am going to rely on you to tell me if I mistype the words "Buck Cluck," goodness gracious).  A year later, Chicken Little's reputation remains that of the crazy sky-is-falling kid, and his father's advice remains to attempt to fade into the background and just hope everybody forgets and ignores him, though what Chicken Little wants is redemption, and the respect of his whole community, rather than just his small clique of fellow social cast-offs.  These number three: there's the hideous duck, Abby Mallard (Joan Cusack); the rotund hog, Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn); and the fish out of water, Fish Out of Water, who wears a helmet to survive on land (gurgles provided by the film's editor, Dan Molina, but unintelligible and otherwise a pantomime figure).  Chicken Little is a resourceful wee scamp, though what he sets his mind to in order to achieve his dreams of popularity is rather counterintuitive, and seemingly born of his dad's own history as a big jock hero (something not much of his design, animation, or vocal performance otherwise implies).  Chicken Little's gonna go out for baseball, ignore his coach's wise if brusque instructions to rely entirely upon his microscopic strike zone, and, nonetheless, hit a home run.  Things look good for Chicken Little, except then the sky falls on him.

To be clear, though, somehow not one writer on this film ensured that these events would be causally related.

We can, I guess, assume that this is actually the second time it's happened (it's never really explicitly spelled out), but what's struck Chicken Little right in the gourd this time is a hexagonal tile that displays, basically, whatever is behind it, and it appears to be part of a giant deception by who knows what kind of alien intelligence for who knows what purpose, but Chicken Little and his friends try to warn the town, and Chicken Little's credibility is right in the crapper again, until the aliens, perhaps piqued by Chicken Little's accidental abduction of a creature that looks like an all-fur Troll doll with three swirling eyes floating in the hair, just straight-up reveal themselves and start blasting everybody.

Here's what I'll say about Chicken Little: it actually has kind of a fun vibe.  This vibe is suboptimally presented, both visually and narratively; and it will get totally ruined by the end.  But if Chicken Little were what its story and characters and general approach to comedy clearly wanted it to be—a hand-drawn Nickelodeon cartoon from several years back into the 90s, drawing on live-action kid's adventures of the 80s—I think there's a slight chance it's successful, so long as "what it wanted to be" included being something that avoided its third act entirely, and it'd have been nice if it finessed a first act that, as it stands, feels like its own episode of the Nickelodeon cartoon it wants to be, an episode that "introduces characters" and "establishes setting" and all that necessary stuff, but is still devoted to material that just vanishes in a puff of smoke with the hard narrative reset that comes with the whole "it's about aliens now" thing.  (It's honestly slightly perplexing that Dindal and his screenwriters and his co-scenarists didn't see any need at all to actually show us the beginning of the first "falling sky" incident; the result is that the movie, a movie with a story that turns on kid's adventure-style sci-fi mystery, essentially fails to include the least hint of any mystery, until at least halfway through its 81 minute runtime.)

But it's arguably got something like the proper ingredients of a successful screenplay, and even on an aesthetic level, it's got a few of the proper ingredients of successful animated film design, particularly backgrounds overseen by David Womersley that take on a sort of post-Burton off-kilterness that actually should support both the idea of a paranormal mystery and the extremely kinetic and wacky slapstick comedy that Dindal wants to get up to; along the way, we have at least some incomplete imagination about what a town full of different animal species entails.  (Just for two prime examples of each of these things happening at once, the first ten or so minutes include two very creative gags that I pretty much love: one is an unstressed piece of world-building regarding the fish, who drive around town in a goofy-looking fishbowl; the other is a hugely stressed joke about rabbit fecundity, in which the rescue of the occupant of a rabbit pram turns into a giant paper people chain of dozens of offspring.  As for that imagination being incomplete, it's weird that some animals are to scale with one another, and most are not, so, e.g., Chicken Little is dwarfed by Runt and Runt's mom is a veritable colossus, but rabbits and dogs and foxes are all the same size.)  Those backdrops don't even suffer, much, from being early and (we'll get to it...) bad CGI: it looks so much like molded plastic that it winds up working as molded plastic, like we've got a stop-motion set on our hands, one that's merely unaccountably occupied by, well, these digital things.

If I was suggesting the movie's funny, it's not as completely unfunny as its reputation, anyway, and I think it's barely possible you could identify the maker of The Emperor's New Groove here, though it helps to have the prompt; the main thing is that The Emperor's New Groove strikes a tone with its goofy material, a certain knowing smirk, that indicates it's at least as much for grown-ups even if children will also laugh; and Chicken Little is just straight-up expressly aimed at kids and rather small ones—I could point to a long dialogue exchange that's just synonyms for urination—though it's more thoroughgoingly felt in the rhythmless mania of its verbal and visual gags.  (I would probably have predicted, too, that "put-upon Zach Braff playing a baby" was going to be a step down from "arch-smug David Spade playing a spoiled god-king," however it shook out.)  Even so, there are chuckles here (anytime Harry Shearer is on hand to do Kent Brockman, I chuckled), and even a few real laughs, and if I didn't have to look at these character designs, I'd likely be less abraded by Runt being an irritating milquetoast or Fish doing annoying silent mugging; I even laughed out loud at the timing and meanness of a gag where Chicken Little's schoolyard antagonist, Foxy Loxy (Amy Sedaris), is confronted by the invading aliens, and is immediately vaporized.  The downside to laughing at this joke is that I felt palpably betrayed by it—though I should've known—because obviously this Disney film isn't fucking vaporizing anybody, though it's not even that it turns out she's alive (this is the same structure that actually played with the defenestration of that old man in New Groove, it's practically the same joke!), it's that Dindal betrays you pretty much immediately once he starts vaporizing other secondary cast members.  By the second one, you already know it's a fake-out, because while you can trick your brain into accepting the joke the first time, no amount of self-deception is going to allow you to even momentarily believe Disney has permitted an onscreen massacre.  (As for Foxy Loxy, don't fret, her fate is worse than death, though I don't know if that's funny.)

By all accounts, it doesn't make sense.

It doesn't help that the movie's gotten itself good and fucking broken by this point, either, and this really is a pretty bad story, that's more disappointing because it's a bad arrangement of decent parts that feel like they ought to fit together better.  Structurally, it's a bit of a disaster.  I've noted how it doesn't establish mystery and the first phase of the movie has very little to do with the second, but to the extent it has a throughline, and I suppose we'll have to identify that as Chicken Little's relationship with Buck Cluck, it's practically just an arc-free collection of reactions to events: Buck Cluck is disappointed in his son, then proud of his son, then disappointed again, then the aliens are right there, so of course he believes him now, so the script is forced into the awkward corner of the "big" emotional payoff revolving around whether Buck Cluck will endorse Chicken Little's specific tactics regarding the alien attack, and it's some really wan stuff, not remotely made better by a script that may be ground zero for therapy language's invasion of American screenwriting, with a real shit-ton's worth of invocations of "closure" (a concept I don't think it even correctly understands) and the like, Abby's junior family counselor being its principal vector.  And that's messy, which is in keeping with the storytelling in this film: Chicken Little, being of 2005, is absolutely ridden with pop songs (the most offensive of which is the best actual song, "The End of the World As We Know It," dropped with blundering perfunctoriness over the end of the world as our heroes know it), and there are at least three full bad pop song montages, and two of those montages are stacked up, literally atop one another, two completely different sequences with I'm not sure but possibly not thirty seconds between them.

What truly sucks about Chicken Little is just the way it goes about shutting everything interesting about its plot down.  It's premised on the twist that everything is actually all only the result of miscommunication, which is extremely aggravating because the movie is communicating its misdirections so clearly.  (Except for the second act turn, which is a rather unparsable thing regarding the cloaking panels and a glowstick.)  But Chicken Little is vastly more enjoyable and cool when you still think it's about Chicken Little discovering that his entire world is a zoo exhibit, not unlike a comedic talking animal cartoon version of Dark City.  Meanwhile, the entire third act is basically just shrill action for the sake of shrill action—that small creature Chicken Little found? why, he's just the aliens' kid, who got lost, E.T.-style, so this "invasion" is only a rescue mission—though it's the kind of "rescue mission" where you fire lasers at the person holding the apparent hostage.  (Then again, since they're teleportation beams and not lasers, I guess Chicken Little actually outsmarted me, though what this means is that it's simply not very enjoyable being jerked the fuck around by a movie made for seven year-olds.  This also goes to its clear awareness that you've guessed that they're in an alien zoo, so that the visuals are communicating a sky literally cracking apart to exploit that assumption, only to then give you something stupid instead.)

And then there are the visuals, which are famously not ready for prime time, and, like I said, years behind the state of the art even in 2005.  Given that basically all CGI animation of this vintage has aged kind of badly, it flattens the blow slightly, and even gives it time capsule appeal: if the script were better, I could be talked into liking the way I don't like it.  But it's not, so it's just ugly, with the aforementioned exception (sort of) of the backgrounds, which is curious, because Chicken Little is building off the dubious foundation of The Secret Lab's "Disney" movie, 2000's Dinosaur,* which didn't even have backgrounds, taking the unusual recourse of being a CGI cartoon with collaged live-action backdrops.

I have an inkling that maybe this particular absence of experience partially explains the biggest thing wrong with Chicken Little: some abjectly terrible compositing.  These characters only sometimes look like they exist in this world at all; a lot of the film, they're floating above it instead, and there are endemic mismatches (not even subtle ones) between lighting conditions on the characters and the backdrops, sort of like if this fully-rendered CGI cartoon were actually the result of rear projection.  The character animation is early days, but more in tune with the standards of 2005 than anything else: we find a fair amount of WDFA animation talent trying their hand at the new art form, though I suppose it's no accident that the most successful of the bunch is probably Jason Ryan, a newer animator supervising Chicken Little, whose main experience was, in fact, on Dinosaur; Nik Ranieri, a would've-been-a-superstar, was assigned Buck Cluck, and the Hades and Kuzco animator was not an intuitive choice, though I suppose he gets across that Buck Cluck strongly suspects he's a lousy parent, albeit at the cost of the rooster patriarch going through the whole movie looking gassy about it.  I also have a pressing need to mention that a lot of layouts are terrible, somewhat thanks to CGI giving even greater control over a "camera" that you can knock around like it's actually "there," since for some reason people loved that shit in the 00s.

Ultimately, this movie could've been great and it still would've been bound to some level of "not good" by the brute fact of these character designs interacting with the available level of technology: Chicken Little himself is ambitious, in his way, in that there's a clear intention (and this early in the CGI era, too) to try to see if you could make a genuinely abstract cartoon figure this way (he's basically just circles of a head and glasses sitting atop a diminutive stick body with the flair of a rooster comb and two black dots for eyes), and it's more effective than "two black dots for eyes" (accomplished by just two very predominant irises) probably deserves.  It's a minor stroke of brilliance that somebody interceded to give him the "eyebrows" on his feathers that are the major reason he reads as sympathetic rather than demonic, or I guess "more than only faintly demonic," since he still is, a bit.  But he's certainly a cut above his friends: everyone points to Abby, but I'd say Runt is the most disgusting thing in the movie, just this giant sphere of flesh on the tiniest possible legs such as never should have survived the test animations demonstrating how horrifying this looked in 3-D (though they evidently thought it was funny, as there's a dialogue joke about the legs), while his skin has this smooth, glistening, cooked quality to it; now, Abby is a monstrosity, but a technological rather than visceral one, and somehow all that stuff I said about the failures of this movie's compositing apply at as miniscule a level as the different parts of this character's face, which appears to be a collage of independently-rigged objects vaguely suggesting "expressions."  She is, it's fair, supposed to be revolting, and in a movie that wasn't this mired in 2005-going-on-1985 tech (say, for instance, this character showed up in a movie today) you'd call her avant-garde.  But, obviously, Chicken Little is so mired:

Of course, then these characters move, and outside of the more rigorously-built, snappy, often-Rube Goldberged setpieces (most of them involving specifically Chicken Little and a cute mastery of grade school physics), they move awkwardly.  They still move better than the "extras," who always have a Nintendo 64 kind of cast to them, rather than just sometimes like the leads.  There's some bright spots on the margins: for a minute or two, the aliens in their battle armor come off honest-to-God fucking scary, with clipped-looking animation that emphasizes the disorienting arrival of something out-of-category and unknowable, though this unfortunately doesn't last even the entire scene of their introduction before their neon angry-faces reduce this to an appropriate (that is, completely unaffecting) level; the coolest thing in the movie gets the same "and now you know it's actually something lame, therefore it is nominally humorous" treatment, though while it remained a going concern, I did like the look of the black void in which Chicken Little and his dad are interrogated by several enormous tricloptic swatches of color.

Altogether, this movie is rather forceful about how much it would've preferred to have been traditional animation.  Not even that far into the future, Disney would get extremely good at the new medium, but there could have been very little indication of that in 2005, and while it doesn't seem like anybody really enjoyed Chicken Little much, even at the time, it could only have confirmed the bleakest forecasts of CGI animation's superiority at serving animation's very highest purpose, which, as we all know, is getting parents to buy tickets to a movie that'll quiet their kids with an hour and a half of fucking nonsense.

Oh, and by the way: Bluck Cuck.

Score: 4/10

*It's also building off the exertions of a lot of Industrial Light & Magic personnel, perhaps solely as a matter of its conversion to a 3-D presentation (notably, Alan Trombla is credited here and also listed on two of ILM's 3-D conversion patents); but it's a veritable army of ILM "digital artists" on Chicken Little's credits.