Animation Defenestration: The one that was supposed to be the worst Disney movie

 

Title: Chicken Little

What Year?: 2005

Classification: Mashup

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

As I write this, I’m closing on my 200^th movie review, and I reminded myself that I not only haven’t done an installment of this feature in almost 2 months (see, dear Logos, Lord of the Rings) but still haven’t cracked double digits. The latter fact is in part because the load has been split between this and my “worst” movies feature, and I’ve already had some doozies on both sides. In the process, I’ve ended up with some loose ends and paths I declined over others. With this review, I’m coming back to the biggest of these, a notorious film that didn’t interest me as much as others that were entirely obscure. While I have never questioned the resulting decisions, I knew a rematch was do sooner or later. Once I did get a look at the material in question, I never doubted a review was in order. With that, I present Chicken Little, the one people say is the worst Disney movie ever.

Our story begins with a town full of anthropomorphic animals where our title character causes a panic when he insists that an object he can’t locate fell from the sky. The townsfolk laugh it off, even though they reacted more disproportionately than the kid ever does, and he goes back to being bullied by his classmates. Things take a positive turn as he gets closer to his friends, then wins the approval of his borderline-neglectful father and his peers by winning a baseball game. But then he gets clonked by another mysterious artifact from the sky, a piece of superscience material that can turn invisible. The band of friends soon realize that a cloaked alien ship is overhead, and get followed by a small little alien. However, Chicken Little is unable to convince the townspeople, despite being backed up by his friends, until the aliens begin an attack. It turns out that the commander is trying to find his own son, and ready to obliterate the town in retaliation. Can Chicken Little save the day, or is our hero deep fried?

Chicken Little was a 2005 CGI animated film by Disney, the first such feature created without the involvement of Pixar. The film had the same title as a World War 2 propaganda short film, which was unrelated except for a shared folk tale source. Development was reportedly prolonged by repeated rewrites, including a change of the main character’s gender. The film starred Zach Braff as Chicken Little and Joan Cusack as friend/ love interest Abby, with Garry Marshall as the father Buck. A high-profile supporting cast included Patrick Stewart, Adam West (see Batman), and Don Knotts in his final role as mayor Turkey Lurky. The film was a commercial success, earning a worldwide gross of $314 million against an estimated $150M budget. However, it received negative contemporary reviews and acquired a further reputation as a “worst” Disney movie in online lists and reviews. It remains available on Disney Plus.

For my usual experiences, I really only considered watching this film as part of my project to find a representative “worst” Disney movie, which led to my reviews of The Black Cauldron here and The Wild under Very Bad Movies. What I dragged to the table was the certain knowledge that the actual “worsts” weren’t really on the radar. Any seasoned animation scholar or fan could tell you that the most objectively and genuinely awful things Disney ever made were from long, long ago, when much of their output still amounted to shorts. (I have a certain entry in mind, but I can wait till I am very prepared.) For inexcusable low quality in the feature-length category, it’s quite fair to start a lot closer to home, and the mid-2000s movies, especially those made “in-house”, are definitely a perfect storm. It was a transitional period of full of throwbacks, experiments, and direct-to-video sequels and other quickies that weren’t intended to compete on the general market. The end result was a few immediate hits, a handful of eventually accepted “classics” that struggled or failed in their own time, and a bumper crop of entries that would be either notorious or forgotten. Even sight unseen, it’s hard to take it as anything but blind bad luck that Chicken Little became the most maligned of them all.

Moving forward, the central reality of the film is that it feels made for kids first, with very little of the usual “Disney Renaissance” nudging toward teens and adults. If this is taken as an honest choice rather than suicide by focus group, many of its arguable flaws become excusable or at least understandable. The story is episodic and simple. The animated characters (especially the aliens and the Fish Out Of Water) are boldly rendered and vaguely stylized. Multiple scenes focus on preteen nightmares and wish fulfillment, complete with dodgeball and missing pants. (Must… suppress… Donald Duck rant…) The adult authority figures, to some extent including Buck, are exaggerated or caricatured, with little if any further explanation of their reasoning and motivations. Finally, the resolution is brought about by non-violent negotiation that happens to coincide with the main characters’ reconciliation. All of which is to say that this isn’t great, but realistic enough to stay within its limitations.

On a deeper level, what the film has going for it are a genuinely likable main character and a quite strong story. The real problem is that the film repeatedly squanders its potential, to the point that even its good moments become frustrating long before the end. The obvious recurring problem is that Chicken Little’s dilemmas depend consistently on others being irrational and/ or actively mean, which by all means works for the bullies at his school, but not for the adults. Unless what we see is distorted by the protagonist’s viewpoint (the kind of ambiguity a typical Disney Afternoon episode would have set up), the adults are entirely to blame at almost every turn. They know he’s a kid; they clearly believe he is overimaginative; so there’s absolutely no reason for them to charge about in a mob based only on what he says. The deeper and especially irritating difficulty is that Chicken Little is really no better in comparison. When he finds obviously advanced alien technology, he doesn’t mention it to an adult until after he loses it. He doesn’t appeal to his friends to confirm his story until the adults are already suspicious. And in the finale, when the townsfolk are by all appearances being massacred in front of him, he could literally wave his little alien friend in front of any of the combat mechs at any time. Instead, he rushes around a literal battlefield to get the fuzzball to a completely arbitrary point. The fundamental problem isn’t that this is entirely unbelievable; it’s that nobody except Buck ever admits a mistake, much less learns from it.

That leaves the “one scene”, and the one that stood out to me is the baseball game. As Chicken Little takes the plate, there’s a familiar, perhaps jarring voice from the very adult announcer. That would be Harry Shearer of The Simpsons using the voice of Kent Brockman, in a pleasant touch if you can adjust to it. There’s an intended comical moment as our protagonist tries to raise a bat literally bigger than he does, which really emphasizes how little of this assumed world makes any sense, internally or otherwise. If this was a properly worked out multispecies society, there would be some kind of handicapping system here, or else the other team would be switching out their pitcher for one closer to the batter’s size. As it is, it’s obvious that Chicken Little can get a walk just by standing there, something that others loudly and repeatedly say to him. The announcer narrates as he swings nevertheless, and gets completely undeserved credit for what follows.

In closing, what I find myself coming back to is who on Earth the usually savvy Disney marketing engine thought they were making this movie for. In objective quality, it isn’t nearly as bad as The Wild (except Disney can’t deny technically making it), nor is it quite as muddled and willfully mediocre as The Black Cauldron was. The fact remains that Disney clearly miscalculated, far more badly and fundamentally than they did with immediate box office failures and disappointments like Treasure Planet and Meet The Robinsons (I’m thinking, I’m thinking…). In the proverbial light of day, this was a movie that tried to be “middle of the road” on a 5-lane freeway, too dumb for adults, too scary and cynical for kids, and too strange for any part of the mainstream. If there was a “right” move for Disney, it was to cut their losses and turn this one out to pasture on the direct-to-video market, where the shell-shocked parents and animation fans would probably have been grateful for anything that reached a high standard of mediocrity. But that, of course, would have meant putting their reputation ahead of making actual money. So, touche, Mouse. And with that, I am done.