Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a rather unhappy look at Disney's try to replace Pixar with their own in-house team, CHICKEN LITTLE. I think I'm seeing this one sometime this week and I hope I have a better time in the theater than the below reviewer, but I've got a feeling that this one will pander to the 3 year olds and leave the rest of us holding our heads. At least that's the impression I get from the trailers. I don't really want to suffer through a crappy movie, so I'm hoping for the best!!!
Harry
Haven’t seen any reviews of Chicken Little, the new Disney CGI feature, on your site yet so I thought I’d run one in.
If only there had been some early reviews on the net, I could have avoided wasting two hours of my time and that of my kids. The movie is pretty abysmal compared to the recent efforts of Pixar and Dreamworks. As I’m sure everyone knows, the story revolves around Chicken Little and his ‘sky is falling’ story. The premise is in fact decent – that the sky really is falling, as a prelude to an alien incursion on Earth. The execution however is atrocious.
The story meanders from being a painfully slow father-son bonding and discovery movie to the clichéd unpopular kids in school get their chance to show up the cool kids. The problem is that it tries too hard to fit in all the storylines it begins, to the detriment of the movie as a whole. What makes it worse is the painful choice of songs in the movie and the way it keeps breaking out into inappropriate song montage sequences. The fact that they had to shoehorn in a supporting character (Runt of the Litter) - with an obsession over music - in order to justify some of the songs was proof of the weak work that went into sequencing the story.
The character designs were ok – uninspired at best. I don’t think they’re going to make a heap on the character merchandising. The voicework was nondescript and characterless. It’s sometimes hard to distinguish who’s talking. The character that received the best response was Fish-out-of-Water, a non-talking visual comedy part. The rest of the CGI was bright in a much more cartoony way, then the recent work done in Incredibles or Madagascar. In fact, the bits at the end were very similar in look and feel to classic Looney Tunes. An interesting choice but one which I personally didn’t go for in the current age of distinctive CGI movies.
A quick strawpoll of the six kids who were in the group I was taking into the cinema showed a distinct feeling of boredom with the whole proceedings. And these were your 2-8 year olds, hardly the most discerning of audiences normally. If this is the best that Disney can come up with, I predict Steve Jobs rubbing his hands in glee at the ridiculous amounts of cash he will be able to demand from them to renew their partnership.
In a nutshell, AICN readers with kids are better off investing their time taking them out for some fresh air and sunshine at a park.
Hope this helps
Call me Stumpy (again).
