Chicken Little

Features, Shorts, Live-Action and Direct-To-Video
Post Reply
User avatar
AV Founder
AV Founder
Posts: 25294
Joined: October 22nd, 2004
Location: London, UK

Re: Chicken Little

Post by Ben » November 12th, 2020, 4:57 am

EricJ wrote:
November 11th, 2020, 8:38 pm
you can go back and watch the "holy" Cats Don't Dance
Well, it’d be nice if Warner Archive put out a widescreen Blu-ray...

AV Founder
AV Founder
Posts: 7261
Joined: October 23rd, 2004
Location: SaskaTOON, Canada

Re: Chicken Little

Post by Randall » September 4th, 2021, 2:00 pm

I decided to give Chicken Little another try last night, after hating it when I first saw it in the theatre. My poor son joined me to see it for his first time (he was born 2 years after the film's 2005 release).

Whoa boy. It may actually be worse than I remembered. That primitive CGI animation has not aged well, I still don't like some of the character designs, the plot is all over the place, random pop songs intrude.... Overall, just a bleh film, though it does have some good moments. But my son agreed--- it was not good.

No wonder DreamWorks Animation was so welcome at the time. (Madagascar and Aardman's Were Rabbit came out that same year.)

AV Forum Member
AV Forum Member
Posts: 5192
Joined: September 27th, 2007

Re: Chicken Little

Post by EricJ » September 4th, 2021, 3:41 pm

Yes, there are some films you find yourself thinking "No...It CANNOT have been that bad, given what they had to work with. Maybe I wasn't understanding it. Maybe I was just in a bad mood."
So you show it to someone else, and...yeah, it was bad. I've had that experience with other movies.
(I mean, other people seemed to like Beetlejuice, Austin Powers and the first Shrek so much, I was actually questioning my own beliefs. :( )
Randall wrote:
September 4th, 2021, 2:00 pm
No wonder DreamWorks Animation was so welcome at the time. (Madagascar and Aardman's Were Rabbit came out that same year.)
There is no burning insult like a desperate imitation. Any reason you may have ever had to hate DWA was copied, warped, and magnified into grotesque mutated proportions by Disney, during Eisner's belief that they should surrender the studio's head to Shrek 2 in shame.

I remember when it came out, Jim Hill--who believed the TAG Guild Blog rumors like the Mike Lindell of Disney--so wanted to demonize Disney's upcoming John Lasster/Pixar deal, he spent the entire month-or-less of the film's release trying to raise the banner of "It wasn't a flop! Eisner doesn't need to spend all that money! WDFA can STILL be a rival to Pixar!...C'mon, it wasn't that bad!" :lol:

User avatar
AV Founder
AV Founder
Posts: 25294
Joined: October 22nd, 2004
Location: London, UK

Re: Chicken Little

Post by Ben » September 4th, 2021, 7:24 pm

The mirror *really* warps when you go back and see Valiant again. No, it doesn’t have the whizz-bang visuals of today, or that could probably match Chick Lit back in the day, but t does what it does within its limitations very well. I think I wrote in one of my reviews that, when it came to Disney's animated feathered features from the same year, who would have thought the independent "cheap" CG import would come off best against the big studio product. What Chick Lit has in loud brashness, Valiant has in underdog pluckiness, and where it lacks in budget it has real heart.

Post Reply