Movie Thoughts: Chicken Little (2005)

• Released: 4 November 2005
• Directed by: Mark Dindal
• Running time: 1 h 21 min
• Rating 1.5/5

Synopsis

A young chicken, who is the town's laughing stock, tries to prove himself to his neglectful and successful father by proving aliens exist.

My Thoughts

Definitely one of the movies I was looking the least forward to revisiting for my Disney Journey. I've seen it before once or twice, but never really liked it. So let's get this over with.

Honestly this movie is just bad. Not offensively bad like some claim, but it is still bad and not a graceful first entry as Disney's first all-CGI movie. It looks unpolished and cheap, even for early 2000s CGI movie standards. Like, Shrek, which came out a few years before, had a much smaller budget yet still looked so much better and more diverse. The fur textures here don't look very polished and they keep re-using the same four character models for all background characters.

The characters are also kinda shit. Like, Chicken Little is decent. He's small but inventive and doesn't give up. But Abby? Just boring. Fish and Runt are pretty much walking jokes, though Fish is admittedly the best character of the film and he doesn't even have any dialogue. The worst is without a doubt Buck, CL's neglectful dad who is very obviously ashamed of his son. He just sucks and the fact that he apologizes for his abuse doesn't make me suddenly like him. Instead of standing up for his son who is so infamous he's bullied wherever he goes, he makes it obvious that he's ashamed of Chicken Little and does nothing but talk down to him until Little rightfully calls him out on it. And even after that I don't feel like his redemption and forgiveness is earned. 

The town itself is just shit as well. Imagine being an entire community dedicated to hating a young kid because he made a mistake a few years ago? Literally nobody but his three friends stand up for Chicken Little. The entire fucking town is otherwise against him. That's just way too mean-spirited, man. I can buy him being bullied by his classmates; teenagers can be relentless in their bullying, after all. But an entire goddamn town? That's just too nasty to keep the movie likable. Honestly, when the aliens came and started to assault the villagers it felt good because they have been nothing but antagonistic so far.

As for the alien stuff, it's fine. Honestly I liked that part of the plot better than the whole "Chicken Little joins the baseball team to gain his father's approval"-stuff.