Chicken Little
Studio: Buena Vista Pictures
Rated: G
Website: http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/chickenlittle/
Release Date: 2005-11-04
Cast: Zach Braff, Garry Marshall, Joan Cusack, Steve Zahn, Don Knotts
Director: Mark Dindal
Screenwriter: Ron J. Friedman, Steve Bencich
Music Score: John Debney
WorkNameSort: Chicken Little
Our Rating: 2.50
Yet another movie that lays the groundwork for being one type of entertainment and abruptly becomes something else entirely. The computer-animated Chicken Little introduces itself as a mildly inspired update of a familiar fable, with a small town of animal critters laughing off our hero’s (Zach Braff) doomsaying and thus making his school hours even more stressful than they already are. The handful of jokes that connect are so sassy that it doesn’t even matter too much that Chick Lit’s cute character modeling is a straight cop from Looney Tunes’ Egghead Jr. But then the movie takes a bizarre detour into sci-fi territory, offering a concrete reason why the sky appears to be falling and aping the moves of (of all things) War of the Worlds. There’s no real reason to watch past that calamitous departure point except to count how many stale ’70s songs director Mark Dindal (The Emperor’s New Groove) can string into an unbroken medley of banality. Note to Hollywood: “I Will Survive” has now officially lost its right to exist anywhere outside of a wedding reception.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2005.