Chicken Little

zach braff as chicken little

A piece of the sky? Shaped like a stop sign? Not again!

~ Chicken Little

quick fox: D-

joan cusack as abby mallard

winding dragon

If the 1990s is called the Disney Renaissance, then the 2000s should be known as the Disney Recession. In the 1990s, Disney Animation grossed over 3 billion worldwide at the box office with films including Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), and Mulan (1998). The next decade produced unmitigated flops like Home on the Range (2004) and a gazillion sequels that tarnished classics, as Disney struggled to keep pace with the evolving 3-D animation industry. 

Right in the middle of the Recession is a movie about a timid fowl (whose red comb looks like three floppy pieces of Swedish Fish) and space aliens (who look like living wigs of the DreamWorks Trolls). But what makes Chicken Little (2005) interesting is not the outrageous plotline, it’s the fact that it heralded a new era. 

Chicken Little (Zach Braff) is as awkward as his name suggests. Though tiny, even by anthropomorphic chicken standards, he somehow manages to find ingenious solutions to everyday problems that he causes for himself. For example, he steps in gum on a busy street (physically playing out a terrible pun about a chicken and a road) and gets literally stuck in traffic. One evening his world comes crashing down around him when a piece of alien technology (the same shape as a Settler of Catan tile) hits him on the head. The technology has camouflage abilities, and when it hovers in the air it blends in perfectly with the sky. The discovery precedes an alien invasion, forcing Chicken Little to prove to the town that he’s not little, he’s a big chicken.

Chicken Little stands in an awkward place in Disney animation history because it tried desperately to break free from the company’s slump. Trying to maintain a competitive edge with Pixar and DreamWorks, Chicken Little became Disney’s first 3-D animated feature. The project was four years in the making, and the animators spent a long 18 months intensively training with computer software. The tagline on many of the posters, “The end is near,” could be ironically/cynically applied to the death of Disney’s 2-D animation department (with the lone exception of the 2009 fairy tale The Princess and the Frog). 

In many ways, the endeavor was a success. The animation, though not perfect, surprisingly still holds up today. (Lewis from the 2007 film Meet the Robinsons looks suspiciously like a humanized version of Chicken Little.) When Chicken Little explores the alien spaceship, it’s a fun animation sequence and it’s obvious the animation team put a lot of hard work into designing that scene.

That said, the problem is that every other aspect—the plot, the characters, the dialogue—is like eating a raw egg. The story lacks imagination and most of the time, I found myself cheering for the aliens to just wipe out the whole town and be done with it. 

Like I said before, Chicken Little is an important piece of Disney animated history because it was a stepping stone toward the company’s revival in the past ten years. Without it, we probably don’t have the beautiful cityscape of San Fransokyo in Big Hero 6 (2014) or the creativity behind a different animal universe in Zootopia (2016). The relatively commercial success (despite ridicule from critics) of the fowl movie allowed Disney to further explore 3-D animation. Though without any real passion behind the story, it was impossible for this chicken to ever take flight.

steve zahn as runt of the litter