Chicken Little

Review by Jason Gaston

 A studio was turned onto its gigantic round black ears, famous animators lost their jobs, fans cried out in agony, and Disney completely destroyed an 80 year legacy of hand drawn animation... and this movie, Chicken Little, is the result? This unfunny self-referencing thing is the future of Disney? Disney killed 2D animation for this?

God, someone hold me.

If you haven't guessed by now, Chicken Little did little to ruffle my feathers or bolster my confidence in what I see as the end of Disney animation. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm sure, as long as there are parents to buy tickets for screaming little brats, there will be cartoons from Disney rendered in the seamless CGI format that everyone is all nuts about these days, but it appears that the timeless storytelling of Sleeping Beauty, The Lion King, and even more recent ventures like Brother Bear are a thing of the past. I've seen the future of Disney and it looks like it's going to be a long string of pop-culture movies that will be laughably dated in less than five years.

And, you know, even though I gripe about it constantly, it's not even Disney's refusal to do anything in traditional 2D that's bothering me right now about this movie. Rather, it's the lack of a real story... a story that breaks your heart, makes you smile, or makes you think. If Disney cranked out CGI movies with great stories, I'd be happy (heck, it's one of the reasons I love Pixar) but if Chicken Little is any indication, 2D animation isn't the only thing that the Mouse Factory expelled and flushed when it was given a CGI enema by Michael Eisner.

So, we're left with Chicken Little. You know the story, right? A little chicken is sitting around one day when suddenly he's socked in the head with something and assumes that the sky is falling. He tries to tell everyone about the horror about to unfold when it's discovered that it wasn't a piece of the sky that clunked the mother clucker on the noggin, but rather an acorn. Moral: Don't jump to conclusions. End of story.

Don't worry, I didn't just ruin the movie for you. The movie does a good enough job of that itself.

I know what you're thinking... that there isn't enough meat to the old tale of Chicken Little to base a ninety minute movie around, right? Well, you are right. There's not, but it doesn't seem to matter as Chicken Little covers the old fable in a couple of minutes and then launches into a ludicrous atrocity involving baseball and - I kid you not - aliens.

Aliens!

Chicken Little isn't a labor of love or the dawn of a new era at Disney. This is simply the result of a bunch of guys in suits wondering what kind of a movie they can come up with to make a lot of money. Short summery: This is Disney's answer to Shrek, only without the humor, the satire, or the brains.

Chicken Little, though good for a few cutesy laughs, is an acrid assortment of pop culture references mixed in with an atrociously contrived story about a son trying to earn a father's trust.

There is zero... zero about this movie that is surprising, nothing that is noteworthy, and absolutely zilch that remotely places it anywhere in the same solar system as what one would call classic animation. Simply put, Chicken Little is probably the worst animated movie to come out of the Disney studios ever and that includes the unbelievably bad Home on the Range.

If this is Disney's idea of the future of animation then I see a dismal future indeed. I'll take a sixty year old 2D movie over this tripe any day.

It's clucking awful!