REVIEWED - CHICKEN LITTLE: Disney's desperate first foray into computer animation is a slick but charmless hodgepodge, writes Donald Clarke
BACK in November, when this distinctly underwhelming animated fairytale was first shovelled before the American public, industry analysts argued that its fate at the box-office could determine the long-term health of the Disney Corporation. It looked as if Pixar, the entity behind Toy Story and Finding Nemo, might be about to sever its relationship with the Mouse House and if Chicken Little, Disney's first in-house computer-animated feature, didn't perform then, well, the sky might fall upon Walt's inheritors.
They needn't have worried. Digital effluent such as Shark Tale had already demonstrated that even the most fetid, shop-worn scenario can, with a little tarting up from the animation boffins, provide the basis for a smash. Chicken Little, though less entertaining than recent Disney flops such as Home on the Range, duly did very nicely at the turnstiles. Then, just to guarantee global supremacy, Disney bought Pixar anyway. All fairytales should have such happy endings.
Never even hinting at the poignancy of Pixar's best work, Chicken Little - appropriately, considering the subject matter - plays like the manifestation of a collective act of panic. Terrified that they will miss out on any of the elements that characterise the new wave of animated hits, the film-makers have jammed together a multitude of irregularly shaped, not quite congruous storylines into one untidily wrapped package.
The familiar fairytale is played out in an amiable prologue, which, separated from its protracted aftermath, could work passably well as a short. Our titular avian hero (voiced by Zach Braff), having been bopped on the head by an acorn, convinces the shiny inhabitants of his zoologically diverse town that the sky is coming down. Tolerably amusing chaos reigns.
A year later, stopping off in Oprah territory, the film finds Master Little struggling to establish a satisfactory relationship with his widowed father. Sometime after this moving drama has outstayed its lukewarm welcome, the animators, their panic forcefully reasserting itself, arrange for aliens to descend from the firmament. There's a numbingly boring baseball game in there too. And some 1970s disco hits.
One could forgive Disney the coldness of the animation and the shallowness of the pop-cultural references. One doesn't need to forgive the voice talent anything, for they're all in good form.
What fatally undermines the picture is the film-makers' inability to create a stable universe for their characters to inhabit. Chicken Little's hometown - like Shrek's kingdom - is, it seems, populated by characters from fairytales and nursery rhymes. Here's Foxy Loxy. Here's Mayor Turkey Lurkey.
But what's Runt of the Litter, a porcine disco enthusiast, doing here? Why does Fish out of Water, a fish out of water, hang about these parts? I don't understand, Mummy, I don't understand! Can we go home and watch The Incredibles?
