Mark Dindal is a good director. He has an affinity for old school cartoons and a gift for pacing which allows him to stretch that traditionally short-form burst of anarchic energy to feature length without loosing any of it’s potency. He’s also able to find the poignancy within the ridiculous and can create empathy for even the most despicable of his characters, all without letting his movies become overwhelmed by sentimentality. He’s a smart, talented filmmaker, and I hope he’s able to express that talent in his next feature film.
In the meantime, let’s talk about Chicken Little, and why it’s such an abysmal, horrific, Chernobyl-level catastrophe of a film. It’s actually kind of fascinating in the totality of its failure, the way it manages to screw up on just about every front.
STORY/PLOT
So here’s the plot: it all begins with Chicken Little causing mass hysteria in his idyllic small town by crying that the sky is falling. Chicken Little becomes a social pariah and, desperate for his father’s approval, joins the school baseball team where he is a terrible player until scoring a game-winning home run which reverses his reputation overnight. The same night of his great victory another piece of the sky falls on him, which he discovers is actually a piece of an alien spaceship. Chicken Little and his friends manage to sneak aboard the spaceship, accidentally letting out a small creature which triggers a massive alien attack. Eventually Chicken Little manages to achieve closure with his father, stop the aliens, and become the town hero.
It’s actually even more fragmented than it sounds, if you can believe that. The movie is just a series of tenuously connected events without any coherent theme to unite them. I suppose the conflict between Chicken Little’s quest for his father’s approval is supposed to be the glue that holds everything together, but it’s completely isolated from the rest of the story, thematically and in the plotting. (Oh, and then there’s the moment when Chicken Little hides concrete evidence that proves the existence of the aliens he’s been ranting about from his dad. WHY WOULD YOU HIDE DEFINITIVE PROOF THAT YOU WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG?!) It certainly doesn’t help that the conflict is overwhelmingly one-sided, with Chicken Little’s father being a self-professed terrible dad. He doesn’t listen to his son, doesn’t seem to understand him, and doesn’t really try.
The only influence the father-son relationship has on the plot is Chicken Little’s decision to join the baseball team, and that is so disconnected from what should be the main plot (the whole falling sky thing) that it feels like a separately produced short that got shoved in to pad out the film to feature length. (And considering it takes up about thirty minutes of an eighty minute run time, that’s very likely. See also MUSIC.)
Worse than being completely irrelevant to anything, it kills any sense of pacing the film might have had. A sci-fi riff on the original folk tale isn’t a terrible idea, and could be a good gateway to spoof the tropes of sci-fi summer blockbusters. However, since that’s also basically one big joke, it would also necessitate a lean run time; seventy minutes at the most. As it is the sci-fi element isn’t introduced until almost an hour into the movie, and they don’t use it to comment on anything. It only exists to facilitate a big set piece that yields one admittedly cool visual (the sky fragmenting into a series of hexagons as alien spaceships pour out through the cracks).
It’s biggest problem, though, is that the movie is so intent on trying to be clever with its source material that it fails to find a genuine story to tell. Things happen, but there’s absolutely no POINT to any of it.
CHARACTERS
Adapting a story for the cinema necessitates changing it, a tricky alchemy of removing elements and adding new ones to accommodate changes in the medium the degree of which depends on the source material. Fairy tales and fables require an extensive makeover of their characters, since they are often nothing more than archetypes that go through the motions to convey a moral lesson. That somehow failed to happen here, with characterization barely going beyond surface descriptions. Chicken Little gets the most work, becoming an extension of Zach Braff’s neurotic, childish persona (it’s actually slightly less irritating here because Chicken Little is a child) with the addition of a MacGyver-esque gift for inventing things from scratch. Everyone else is a broad archetype, at best, trying in vain to stretch a reference or a pun into a full-fledged character. There’s Joan Cusack’s Ugly Duckling, who is ugly and obsessed with the advise dispensed from teen magazines. There’s Steve Zahn’s Runt of the Litter, an overeating pig who is maybe supposed to be coded gay? (He has a general fondness for ’70s divas, and at one point his mother threatens to take away his Streisand record collection.) There’s Amy Sedaris’ Foxy Loxy, who is a bully. There’s Fish Out of Water, who wears a diving bell full of water and… that’s it.
None of them have arcs, either. They have the impression of arcs, and moments that feel like they should be significant beats in those arcs, but in actuality they get zero development and those moments mean nothing. For instance: the movie sets up that Ugly Duckling is, indeed, ugly, and then does nothing with it until Chicken Little confesses his love for her. She also is adamant about getting him and his dad to talk about their strained relationship, but doesn’t actually do anything about it, and when they finally do talk it’s practically accidental. Certainly not because Ugly Duckling actually accomplished a goal or was proactive in any way. All the other characters just exist, taking up space and popping in for a quick gag before ceding the spotlight to Chicken Little’s uninteresting daddy issues.
Actually, no, that’s not entirely true. There is one supporting character with something resembling an arc, if only on a technicality. See, if we define a character arc as a character having a different point of view at the end of the film than they did at the beginning, then Foxy Loxy definitely has an arc. She goes from being a mean, judgmental bully to a pleasant, nice girly girl. Of course, she doesn’t actually make this change on her own. No, it happens because she gets FUCKING LOBOTOMIZED! I’m barely kidding here. In the third act these aliens are teleporting people and things left and right into their spaceships, and after the film’s climax they re-teleport everyone out again. For some reason, when Foxy Loxy had all her atoms disassembled and reassembled she, AND ONLY SHE, somehow got messed up and is brain damaged, altering his disposition. When the aliens offer to fix her, Chicken Little and his friends tell them not to, with Runt of the Litter taking her on as an accessory.
Which is completely unconscionable. I get that she’s a minor antagonist and it’s funny that she’s been turned from a heinous bitch into sunshine and lollipops because of a mechanical malfunction. Fine, it’s a comedy, you fuck around with your characters before they bounce back to the status quo. But she’s not going to bounce back, because it’s permanent and these other characters made this decision without her consent or with any kind of consideration for her autonomy. What the fuck kind of lesson is that for a kids movie? It’s absolutely horrifying, and it’s an incredibly sour note in an already shitty movie.
HUMOR
The greatest attribute of Mark Mindal’s two previous efforts is their sense of humor. The films have a lightning quick wit with a wry sense of observation and, especially in the case of The Emperor’s New Groove, an endless supply of quotable lines. Most importantly, though, the humor is focused, using gags to create motifs and explore the themes of the story. Unfortunately, and I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, that is all missing from Chicken Little.
For example, there’s a gag where a teacher walks out of a room, and as soon as they’re gone the students all whip out their phones and start talking to other people. Because… those kids sure are on their phones all the time? It’s not a joke, it’s just a thing that happens. Kind of like the “uber cool” porcupine wearing sunglasses and a backwards baseball hat who shows up intermittently to say monosyllabic words that rhyme with “Yo.” Because… that’s how these kids today talk, right?
The rest is largely reference humor, like a sequence where a round water tower crashes through the screen of a movie theater playing Raiders of the Lost Ark right as the giant boulder descends on Indy. Again… not really a joke. And that Raiders footage is an action clip from the live action film which, along with the film’s constant referencing of real life pop culture, raises some strange questions about how exactly this town of anthropomorphic creatures fits into the real world.
MUSIC
By far the movie’s biggest offense is its use of music and montage. A disproportionate amount of this movie is montage, and the narrative nadir of the film comes in a moment where there are two montages back to back. No exaggeration, one montage ends, and the next scene is another montage set to a different song. (Worst of all, it uses these montages to establish information that has already been established, such as one sequence where we learn Chicken Little’s dad doesn’t know how to be a parent because his deceased wife was the primary caregiver, followed immediately by a montage where we learn that Chicken Little’s dad doesn’t know how to be a parent because his deceased wife was the primary caregiver.) Any chance this movie has to watch things happen set to a pop song it will take. Sometimes it won’t even bother with the narrative excuse of a montage, sometimes it’ll just stop so the characters can just sing snippets of pop songs for a few minutes. This happens at least twice, once with Chicken Little singing the majority of Queen’s “We Are The Champions” after winning the big baseball game, and again (moments later) with The Ugly Duckling and Runt of the Litter singing karaoke. There’s no reason behind it, it’s just a thing they do for a couple of minutes. I wouldn’t mind if this were a musical and the songs served a narrative purpose, but it’s just the movie padding itself out to feature length.
FINAL THOUGHTS
This is an incredibly aggravating movie, largely because of all the talent that was wasted. I’ve already mentioned many of the major stars who were involved, but I didn’t get around to the late film appearance of Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara as two daffy, over-protective alien parents, or their alien police officer friend played by Patrick Warburton. I don’t understand why the movie wasn’t about them, because they’re far more interesting and funny than any of the main characters.
But the biggest waste of talent, again, is Mark Dindal, though if nothing else Chicken Little is an illuminating failure that sheds some light on what makes his other two films work so well. Better luck next time.