No Dad, The Sky Really IS Falling!

Chicken Little

As you all know, Disney layed off all their 2D artists to go from making such classic films like "Beauty & The Beast" and "The Hunchback of Notra Dame" to making CGI comedies like "Shrek" and "Shark Tale." You know the story: Disney makes a couple of bad films that flop, and decide to play copycat with the competition. So hand drawn animation is out, 3D animation that shouts out pop culture references is in. As you all know, "Chicken Little" is the first of these films. This is the film that is supposed to establish Disney as a solid contender that can make hit CGI films without Pixar's help, and movies that could damage some of Dreamworks best films.

I went to see the movie yesterday, and let me tell you something: If this is the best Disney can do then they are, in a word, doomed. "Chicken Little" is not a terrible film, it's just not a very good one. As an hour long special I could see myself liking this, seeing as how I liked the first fifteen minutes of the film and the last forty minutes of the film, but other then that this film is such a bore. This movie takes the most basic approach to story telling you can imagine. Basic characters, basic jokes, and the most useless cast I've seen in a Disney film. There are over ten principle characters in this film, but only five of them do anything of importance. Of the five characters that do get significant screen time, I only liked three of them (Chicken Little, Abby Mallard, and Buck Cluck). Fish Out of Water never says anything so you can't relate to him, and Runt of The Litter is so annoying you wish he wasn't there at all.

As with most CGI films, there are several pop songs that may or may not age the movie faster, and while I did buy the soundtrack, I'm going to venture to guess I'll mainly be listening to score (and three of the seven songs). Right now the film is doing decently at the box office, but I'm guessing that reason is mainly because a lot of people were going just to see how Disney would do on their first CGI film apart from Pixar. But if the people are to be believed, it will be a short success. Poor reviews and early lackluster word-of-mouth is threatening to doom this film, and I'm kind of hoping it will.

Not because I have a grudge against the film, but because it would prove to Disney what we've known all along: Hand drawn or computer animated, it doesn't matter. We don't care about the technique, we care about the story. Hopefully this is a lesson Disney is going to learn (though hard they may have to learn it). I also saw "The Weather Man" yesterday, but maybe I'll talk about that in another post.