Unlike, I suspect, many animation fans, I walked into Chicken Little with no opinion about the movie one way or another. I'd seen an extended clip at during the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival jury, and attended the Disney presentation at the conference itself where Mark Dindal and others spoke about the making of the movie at length. And of course I'd seen the trailer online and on TV. Everything I'd seen suggested that it was a good movie, but I've been burned by clips before. And Disney hasn't exactly earned my trust in the last few years.

But there's a lot at stake here for the company. Chicken Little, which they're calling their first fully computer-animated feature (technically true, though it kind of sweeps Dinosaur under the rug), is their one shot at justifying their claim that CGI now rules the roost (sorry) and their shuttering of the Florida and California studios.

So with all these conflicting bits of data, I had no real preconceptions as I sat in the cinema before the preview screening. I did allow myself to over-analyze a few things, like the noticeably extravagant prize drawing (an indifferent-looking tween got herself an Xbox 360), and the opening of the film itself, where a narrator rejects two potential openings as trite: the opening moments of The Lion King, and a truck in on an open fairy-tale book. Interesting, I thought. The corporate mantra has been that Disney is embracing its heritage as it moves into CGI, and here the film is explicitly turning its back on it. It seemed a little heavy-handed, as if they couldn't trust the movie to speak for itself.

But after that, I stopped watching for portentous signs of Disney's new groove and tried to get into the movie.

Believe me, they didn't make it easy. In the first fifteen minutes or so, I found Chicken Little's use of music to be too heavy-handed. When Chicken Little and his dad Buck drive home in more or less awkward silence after a school incident (they're both trying to get past Chicken Little's "sky is falling" faux pas from a year earlier), we're walloped on the head by maudlin piano music and too-loud lyrics that tell us how sad everyone is. I found myself missing Randy Newman's simple and evocative "I Will Go Sailing No More" from Toy Story pretty badly.

I also couldn't reconcile the character design (cartoony, symmetrical) with the stylized, asymmetrical mechanics and backgrounds. I can see how it would work on paper, but the crispness of CGI only reinforces the dissonance between symmetrical and asymmetrical designs, at least for me.

These were the two problems that I couldn't let go of throughout the film, though the use of music stopped being an irritant as the story progressed and it actually became a plot element. But overall, I've got to say that Chicken Little is pretty darned good. Storywise, it deviates from Disney's established formulas and gives us a few surprises. Most Disney movies from The Little Mermaid onward are driven by the "I want" motive of the protagonist (usually established in a song, and obtained after much hardship at the end). Fairly early on, Chicken Little actually gets what he wants (to save face and earn his father's affection), after some effort; what drives his actions after that is his fear of losing what he's finally gained.

I also found I had to reverse an earlier opinion on the film's emotional core. Chicken Little is one of those rare North American animated films that focuses on the relationship between fathers and sons, but I couldn't get into Little's dad's emotional distance at first—there were too many missed opportunities for subtle (and therefore more powerful) interplay. But later, when father and son realize that their initial reconciliation is paper-thin, it leads into more interesting territory—especially for Buck, who doesn't know how to express certain emotions and whose pleading for a return to their too-brief period normalcy feels especially desperate. When the two do really reconcile, he's still not quite sure of how far he can go, which becomes material for some good gags.

Chicken Little isn't quite a home run, but it is something that Disney hasn't had in a long time: an honest-to-God family movie that everyone can enjoy without apology. What irks me—infuriates me, really—is that Disney and the people who buy their line will point to Chicken Little and say, "See? CGI is where it's at."

The thing is, Chicken Little is a good CGI movie. It's cartoony in an assured way that's head and shoulders above Madagascar, while its compositions, use of colour and framing are certainly "cinematic,"—but in its own way, without being too showy. (No roller-coaster rides here.) But my feeling is that all this extra care was put into Chicken Little because of how much was at stake. In short, Disney was desperate enough to put a lot of care into the storytelling and visuals—the kind of care they should have been putting into most of their movies post-Lion King. Too bad they had to be desperate to get to that point.

Chicken Little
Walt Disney Pictures
81 minutes
Buy Chicken Little from Amazon.com or Amazon.com

Labels: Disney, reviews

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