Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Chicken Little

Walt Disney Pictures made a terrible a mistake by letting Pixar go a few years ago, it was a really bad idea. Now they've made their first CGI solo project and the result is Chicken Little, based on the fable about a young chicken who claims a piece of the sky fell and hit him in the head. His town of Oakey Oaks goes into a big debacle, half the city gets destroyed, and it turns out that no piece of sky fell on anybody's head, and that the titular character just got hit in the head by an acorn that fell from a tree. He then becomes the joke of the town, a humiliation to his father, and Hollywood is even making a movie about him and craziness. A year later, he's determined to put behind what happened and show everybody what he can do, though he doesn't know how to do anything, but he'll try, especially with his friends at his side to help him. But he's in trouble again when a real piece of the sky falls on his head, and soon an Alien invasion comes to town, and is up to him to save the day.

Zach Braff, using that kiddy voice he uses in Scrubs sometimes, voices Chicken Little, and he's very good at it and has great comedic timing. Chicken Little himself is a good enough character though I'm not sure how many movies, if any, can be made out of him. His group of friends are the best characters in the movie. Abby Mallard aka Ugly Duckling is voiced by Joan Cusack who is a must have whenever you need to voice a lead female. The character is also pretty good, the voice of reason, always giving Chicken Little advice which she gets from magazines. Then Runt of the Litter, voiced by Steve Zahn, is the big pig always afraid of everything and eating whatever he can find when he gets nervous. And finally, the best character of the pack in my opinion, Fish out of Water. He doesn't talk (though someone called Dan Molina is credited as his voice on IMDB), but he's always there doing something funny in the background. And he always comes through when needed. He's awesome. To complete the kid characters we have Chicken Little's nemesis and the town's star athlete Foxy Loxy, voiced by Amy Sedaris, and Morkubine Porcupine, voiced by the movie's director Mark Dindal. None of these 2 characters worked for me, especially the Porcupine who was supposed to be super cool but ended up being a total waste with just a couple one-word lines every now and then.

Now the adult characters, and this is something that Disney picked up from Pixar and it always works really well (against the all-stars from the Shrek series). Kids won’t have any idea who they are but for us adults is a great and pretty impressive group of character actors and even legends. Garry Marshall voices Chicken Little's father Buck Cluck. The Andy Griffith Show regular Don Knotts (who I know little about and I even thought he had died this year but he actually didn't) is Turkey Lurkey, the town's Mayor, and Wallace Shawn plays Principal Fetchit. And then comes the coolest: it's geek's heaven as Patrick Stewart (Star Trek, X-Men) plays Mr. Woolensworth, one of the schoolteachers, and then there's parts for superheroes Patrick Warburton (The Tick) and Adam West (TV's Batman), and Christopher Guest's regulars Harry Shearer, Fred Willard and Catherine O'Hara.

So that worked well, but what Disney didn't learn from Pixar is to balance the story's maturance (invented word I think) to make it for all types of audiences. Sure, kids loved those Pixar monsters, underwater creatures and superheroes, but their stories had so much more than that, they had stuff that kids did not really understand, but that worked for the adults, especially the ticket buying parents who are the ones that decide if their kids are going to watch the movie or not. And that's Chicken Little's biggest problem, despite a clever (though exhausting) promotional campaign in which the characters simulated classic scenes from other movies, the story ends up being just for kids. They also rip off several sci-fi classics (mostly Spielberg's) like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and even the new World of the Worlds which is totally insane since this movie was before, so it's like the writers decided to update their stolen ideas to make it look cooler. They also make a big reference to King Kong (twice) and there's some Indiana Jones in there too.
Some of that stuff bothered me a little bit, and some I didn't care about, but the thing is that there's already Shrek to do that kind of stuff, and then there's Pixar for original ideas and Hayao Miyazaki for the fantastic stories with his Japanese animation, so it's like there's no need for Disney to come do CGI movies (same goes for Fox). Maybe if they started bringing their classic characters to this new CGI era but I don't think we are ready to accept a computerized Mickey or Donald.

I'm being too hard on the movie actually, because despite all that, I enjoyed it, and it wasn't even close as bad as I was thinking it was going to be. The CGI is the usual perfection, and the big variety of characters, though all over the map with so many different animals, works just fine. Overall, thanks to an (though not original) ok story and a pretty great cast of actors, Chicken Little is a good enough start for Disney in this CGI world, and I wish them good luck in the future, just think a little bit more about us adults for your next entry.