However, Chicken Little can’t find the bit of the sky which has fallen and the crowd conclude it was just an acorn, particularly his self-conscious and emotionally tone-deaf father, Buck Cluck (why don’t they have the same surname? Who knows?), who plays the incident down and apologises on Chicken Little’s behalf, emotionally scarring his son. Everyone believes this without question causing a massive panic and widespread destruction, until everyone calms down enough to actually ask Chicken Little what he’d actually seen. After the opening gag, our hero, the small but plucky Chicken Little, is shown causing a massive panic in his town, Oakey Oaks (which is basically just a normal human town entirely populated by animals), by declaring the “Sky is falling”. You’d be surprised, therefore, to learn that this key theme is little more than backstory for the main character in this film. Essentially the story is a parable about hysterical overreaction and the dangers of apocalyptic beliefs. “Goosey Loosey” and “Turkey Lurkey”) on an ill-fated journey to be exploited (and eaten in some versions) by a fox (called “Foxy Loxy”, of course). It feels purposeless, wastes time and just smacks of an attempt to cynically forge success by ripping off the past this unoriginality and desperation to be relevant is actually the main reason I really dislike this film in a nutshell (pun intended).Īnyway, you’d think from the title, “Chicken Little” that you know what you’re going to get here: in the original fairy tale, Chicken Little (sometimes known as Henny Penny or Chicken Licken as he’s sometimes known to fit in with the other naming conventions in the story) gets in a panic after an acorn falls on his head, declares “the sky is falling!” and convinces a group of animals with rhyming names (e.g. The film starts as it means to go on with an opening gag dependent on your knowledge of popular culture that doesn’t quite hit the mark basically it toys between a number of openings that riff off a number of Disney story-telling conventions like “Once upon a time”, a book opening and plagiarising the Lion King, while Garry Marshall explains to us that each of these are not good ways to begin the story. However, I will say that I had seen this once previously and was very unimpressed – seeing it again was about an appealing prospect as the sky actually falling! Meanwhile, Diana was lucky to have fallen asleep during our first viewing of the movie, so was able to see it with fresh eyes. However, just because it’s influential doesn’t mean it’s good and unfortunately… well, I’ll leave my criticisms for the review. It even, incredibly, tied with the Lion King as having the highest gross opening weekend for a Disney animated film! This success no doubt affirmed for Disney executives that 2-D was out and 3-D was the path forward. The result was (sadly) a commercial success, with Chicken Little opening at #1 at the Box Office for the first time since Dinosaur and the film recouping more than double its outgoings. However, this wasn’t the first fully 3-D animated Disney film, “Dinosaur” receives that accolade and though it is fairly unmemorable, it was obviously enough of a commercial success to encourage the studio to retraining many of its 2-D animators to work on “Chicken Little” (50% of the staff who worked on it were retrained from 2-D animation in fact). Indeed, I have heard some conspiracy theories, absurd as they seem, that Disney let “Treasure Planet” and “Home on the Range” fail to justify making this transition with deliberately poor strategy and marketing just so they could make this transition ( from 26.50 onwards), although personally I’m not sure I buy Disney sabotaging their own profits and reputation and having already reviewed these two films, I actually think they failed because are just fairly mediocre. This film marked a significant change in direction for Disney following the massive commercial failures of “Home on the Range” and “Treasure Planet” (“Brother Bear” released between these films did slightly better), as their attention shifted completely from traditional hand-drawn 2-D animation to fully 3-D films, which at that time had been popularised by Pixar and Dreamworks with smash hits like Toy Story and Shrek. So we embark on the second half of our odyssey of watching and reviewing all 58 animated Disney flicks with our 30th film, Chicken Little.
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