Watching Chicken Little made me feel like an old man. Before the movie was five minutes old, a whole storyline had already been told, and it took only about ten minutes for another one to be dealt with. This all in the frantic, seemingly unconnected way that you see in many animated tv-shows, but which you don't really expect in a Disney movie. It made me shake my head and wonder how I was going to be able to bear even the slight 75 minutes that this movie was going to last. Luckily, things picked up later on, but Chicken Little is still one of Disney's most unsatisfying animated features in the long history of the studio.
Chicken Little centers on, well, Chicken Little, a dimunitive little chick who does not seem blessed by life. He's very small, nearsighted and has an imagination that is a bit too wild for most people who live in the small village that Little and his dad call home. It's especially dad who bears the brunt of his son's wild imagination. When Chicken Little one day rings the town alarm bell because he thinks the sky is falling, this starts such an outrage that even Hollywood shows up to make the movie version of this event. But Chicken may actually have been right, since there is an alien invasion on the way to earth, and the only people who can save the earth are Chicken Little and his friends.
This movie does not really have a storyline, but more a collection of jokes and cool ideas that are connected very loosely. Everything happens so fast that you hardly have the chance to breathe inbetween the different set pieces, and characters are not introduced, they are just there all of a sudden and you are supposed to understand their connection to the main character as soon as possible, because there are more characters on the way. This makes for an almost unbearably hectic first twenty minutes, after which things luckily mellow down a little bit. And it's the moments when the movie actually gives you the chance to follow what's going on that Chicken Little turns out to be not that bad at all. Chicken and his friends have some funny dialogue, there are some nice parodies of popular movies and the resolution to the story shows a warmth that you would not expect after all the zaniness. Sure, it's also quite corny at moments and doesn't have an original feather on it's chicken skin, (besides which, the animation is not as impressive as in most other recent cgi movies) but if you can bear the scattershot way of telling the story, you will probably be able to enjoy what's going on.
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