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Chicken Little November 6, 2005 |
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I’d like to say enough is enough, make it stop, put the animals back in the barn, cut out their voice-boxes, and kill off the downward spiral that is animal-themed computer animated motion pictures. But of course I can’t say it, because I don’t like to publicly beg for something I know isn’t going to happen, so for the foreseeable future, as long as somebody is going to give me free admission, and pay me actual green money to watch them, I guess I’ll have to put up with one “Shrek” and “Finding Nemo” knock off after the next, until the next new Pixar film comes along to lift my spirits, and appreciation for a format that is rapidly growing staler by the month. The most recent exhibitor of the talking CGI animal craze is Pixar-lite Disney Animation, shucking off years upon years of classic hand drawn features to bring us a fully computerized, celebrity voice loaded story about an all animal town and its troublesome titular hero, “Chicken Little”, who makes a fool of himself when he believes the sky is falling on him. The film is guilty of all the worst of the post “Shrek” CGI trappings; its story is paper thin, its characters aren’t funny, its pacing is too quick to fully appreciate the painstaking animation, its montages are poorly set to modern pop music, and its zany humor is unevenly balanced with schmaltzy sentiment that would make old Walt blush. When I saw “Shrek” for the first time, I was moved by the climactic montage, set appropriately to “Hallelujah”, at time in the movie when all of the film’s character were at a crossroads, a scene so good that I likened it to the “Baby Mine” tearjerker in “Dumbo”, but there is no such moment in “Chicken Little”, just an overly sensitive young chicken praying to the stars to give him one chance to make his father proud, and hopefully elicit a tear out of a bored and anxious audience. It’s all well and good to toss a little emotion into your comedy, it was a lynch pin of the early, glorious ‘Simpsons’ years, and worked so well in “The Incredibles” last year, but I’m not buying a puny chick in glasses longing for the adoration of his confused, middle-aged widowed father, that’s just too much to handle in a goofy film that too much resorts to slapstick for laughs, pop music for tears, and an odd alien invasion for thrills, not to mention a cure for writer’s block. The film, Disney’s first wide-release CGI effort, concerns the shrimpy, nerdy, appropriately named birdling Chicken Little, and his attempts to garner favor from his town, Oakey Oaks (home of the best acorn in the universe) after he causes a mass panic when he suggests the sky is falling down around them. It’s not, of course, and young Little (voiced by TV’s Zach Braff) is a laughingstock to the town, and an embarrassment to his once proud father Buck Cluck (Garry Marshall) who has a hard time communicating with his needy, sensitive boy. All seems to be better when Little takes an interest in baseball, a sport Buck exceeded at in school, and somehow wins his team the championship in a whacked-out ballgame montage that defies explanation, but no sooner than you can say mended fences does the sky really, truly fall on poor Chicken Little, in the form of a shape shifting alien spaceship, and he’s back to looking like the town nut cake. But this time he friends – a fish in a airproof helmet, an enormous, shy pig, and a flamboyant ugly duckling – are there to corroborate his story, which eventually leads to a full out alien invasion (I believe one character even references “War of the Worlds” as an in joke), and a race to return a cute little fuzzy three-eyed baby alien to its parents before they doom earth to extinction. Funny, you know, but for a film with a sensitive little chicken as its hero, and a cast of characters with names like Turkey Lurkey, Foxy Loxy, and Goosey Loosey, that orange baby alien is the cutest, and funniest character in the movie, and he’s only around for the final act. A lot of these CGI films about talking things that shouldn’t be talking (“Robots”, “Shark Tale”, “Madagascar”) feature references to a pop culture that, in logical sense, doesn’t exist in their human-free worlds. For instance, in the film’s opening sequence, a giant water tower rolls through town wreaking havoc, eventually rolling through a cinema that happens to be showing the rolling rock scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, and later on, during a typical chase sequence, to keep his motivation up, the gigantic pig sings “I Will Survive”, matching in awkwardness the scene with Chicken Little singing, quite badly, Queen’s “We Are The Champions”. There’s nothing wrong with adult references in a children’s film, but I find it strange that in a world of all dogs, goats, birds, foxes, turkeys, and fish, the animals not only know of Harrison Ford, Gloria Gaynor, and Freddie Mercury, but they seem to worship their product as if it weren’t manmade, and otherwise detrimental to the notion of an all talking animal society. The human referencing is a cheap shot, because, as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the least troubling problems with “Chicken Little”, but it’s part of a rich tapestry in the general decline in non-Pixar, non-“Shrek” related CGI product, that slaps a voice box on any old animal and assumes, with a joke and a tear, that we’ll love it like we did Nemo, Shrek, Donkey, Buzz and Woody. In a cynical review, I’d try to close with a joke about Mr. Chicken Little and an unfortunate case of Avian Bird Flu, but that might upset the kids (the image even upsets me a little), so I’ll just back down, cruise my DVD shelf for my copy of “Finding Nemo”, and let Disney seriously ponder the effect a split with Pixar would have on the quality of their product, because as it stands, Pixar is still the best, and everybody else, including Disney’s newfangled CGI studio, gets lost in their mighty shadow. “Chicken Little” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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