Disney Movie Challenge: Chicken Little (2005)

Disney Movie Challenge

Chicken Little (2005)

 WHAT IS THE DISNEY MOVIE CHALLENGE: With Disney+ making available almost all of their films from the vault I thought it was a good time to watch all the theatrically released feature length Disney Studio Animated films. That’s a lot of qualifications so what does it all mean? It must be a film developed and released under the Walt Disney Animation Studios (so no PIXAR or Tim Burton stop motion films). Must have been released in theaters (no direct to video releases). And feature length (no shorts that played prior to the features). Currently there are 59 films. Starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 going to Raya and the Last Dragon in 2021. 

I went to go post this review and realized I had only wrote about half of it. So I quickly wrote the rest of it. So hope it makes sense.

One of the inspirations for this blog was the list that /Film released in 2019 when Disney+ went live.  On their All 58 Disney Animated Movies Ranked they listed Chicken Little as the worst Disney film.  And when something is considered the worst it only makes me want to see it more, so I have been highly anticipating watching the movie.  While not a great movie it definitely doesn’t deserve the title of worst Disney film. 

The movie takes inspiration from the “Chicken Little'' folktale.   In that story Chicken Little is hit on the head with an acorn and claims the sky is falling.  He causes mass panic before it’s revealed it was just an acorn. The movie starts with that event but then delves into a sci-fi story about aliens trying to invade Earth and only Chicken Little (Zack Braff) and his friends, Abby Mallard (Joan Cusack), Fish Out of Water, and Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn) can stop them.   The emotional center of the story is about Chicken Little trying to prove his worth to his dad (Gary Marshall) who sees him as an embarrassment after the first sky is falling incident.  It originally was going to take place in a summer camp where Chicken Little was supposed to learn self-confidence and stop being paranoid of everything.  That film was scrapped for the story about and retooled for 2 and half years to they finally got the final story.  

Chicken Little was the first fully computer animated film released by Disney Animation. At the time the partnership deal between Disney and Pixar was coming to an end.  Chicken Little was supposed to prove that Disney could compete with PIxar in the computer animation business.  If the movie succeeded it would give Disney more negotiation power to continue the partnership.  If the movie failed then Pixar would have more leverage saying that Disney needs Pixar.  The weird thing is the movie was both a failure and a success.  While it made a lot of money it was critically panned.  So it didn’t really have an effect.  Eventually in 2006 Disney just bought PIxar and ended any competition between the two.  For a deeper dive into the making of Chicken Little check out this Collider article https://collider.com/disney-chicken-little-history-explained/ 

The premise is pretty absurd and one of the reasons why it gets a bad rap. The emotional arc with Chicken Little and his dad doesn’t really work.  It doesn’t feel like any of the emotional changes happen organically.  The whole alien invasion part has some fun parts but things just happen to them without any of their decisions really impacting the story.  The whole thing feels nonsensical.  In the end you just don’t really care.  

The biggest issue might be the film trying to incorporate pop culture references.  It not only dates the movie but feels really out of place.  Although playing the Spice Girls “Wannabe” in 2005 was probably already dated.  I did appreciate that they had a song from the band Barenaked Ladies as they are one of my favorite bands.  

Overall:

The movie is mediocre.  It has it’s fun parts but it doesn’t really hold together.  While the animation might not be great and probably felt sub-par compared to other contemporary computer animated films from Pixar and Dreamworks it’s not the worst thing I have seen.  I can see kids enjoying the silliness of it but not much in there for adults.  The emotional center of the movie should be the relationship between Chicken Little and his dad just doesn’t work.