Chicken Little – Movie Review

This weekend my wife and I went to the new Disney movie, “Chicken Little.” I wasn’t expecting a lot going into it but my wife thought it might be a cute show. Sadly, even my low expectations were not met. It seemed to offer very little. I don’t want to give away the plot because there just wasn’t much to it. I will say however that it was extremely predictable and not very strong. On the positive side the animation was top notch. The negatives were many though:

• Weak Plot – As already stated this was a terrible plot. It tried to have a moral to the story but when that meaning is that a parent should believe something as idiotic as the sky falling, that’s not a good start. In the end the parent feels obligated to “trust” his child and let him climb onto a building into harms way on blind faith. Please, that’s just stupid.
  
• Poor Interpretation of the rules of baseball – Being a huge baseball fan this one really bothered me. At one point there is a play at home plate where the player is called out and the announcer says something to the effect that the game was a disappointing lose. Then the ump reverses the call and the announcer declares that the team who scored won the game. For them to have won the game it must have been tied prior to the runner scoring which means that the game would not have been over had the runner been out. This irks me when any subject is so blatantly misrepresented.
  
• Too Scary for kids – Now we don’t have kids yet but at one point of the movie my wife turned to me and said, “I bet you every kid in this theater has nightmares tonight.” Maybe kids are harder to scare these days but much of the movie seemed like it would be very frightening to a three or four year old for sure. Being that this is suppose to be a kids show this can’t be a good thing.
  
• Not funny – I laughed at one line at the very end of the movie and really didn’t hear much more laughter from the nearly filled theater we saw it in. Not only that but the show poked a lot of fun at an extremely overweight child pig. Is this the sort of thing you want your kids to laugh at?

In summary, seeing this show made me think that Disney has fallen a long way in the quality of their cartoon movies. This whole show seemed to trying to copy the success of shows like “Shrek” and “The Incredibles” and even tie in some of the mass hysteria of “War of the Worlds” but just didn’t even come close. For one you need a better story. I also think the level of realism hurt the story in the long run as it stood in harsh contrast to the absurd story line. I might believe it more if it was a more stylized world. For example in The Incredibles, many of the scenes were highly absurd as well but they worked in the world the movie created. I used to think that Pixar was all about the animation while Disney was driving the story lines but after “Chicken Little” it looks like Disney was just stamping their name on Pixar’s films. Good thing for Pixar that they dropped Disney. Too bad for Disney. They are definitely loosing the magic.