Entry posted by Guest
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…maybe.
So, a friend of mine who worked on Chicken Little recently invited me to a screening of it at the El Capitan theater in Hollywood, in 3D, for members of the visual effects industry.
I should point out that he left Disney a year-and-a-half ago. He’s feeling much better now.
While the theater was mostly full, there were maybe six or eight kids in the theater. The rest were all adults. I think this tended to result in a more “honest” reaction to the film. If the place was packed with kids, they’d probably laugh a lot more at the movie, and if someone else around you is laughing, you tend to respond in kind, even if the movie doesn’t deserve it.
This movie doesn’t deserve it.
Now, I can’t honestly say I hated the movie. I didn’t. But I didn’t like it. It’s not a bad movie. It’s certainly not the train wreck I expected it to be. But it’s not a good movie. Not even close.
What Chicken Little is, is trite, cliché, stereotypical, hackneyed, unoriginal, uninspired, insincere, unfunny, and technically competent. That last one was a compliment. The only one I could really think of.
Chicken Little’s biggest failings are in its story and characters. This is where Disney has been failing for years, and they apparently haven’t “gotten it” yet. The title character is a typical, picked-on nerd stereotype that we’ve seen in dozens of movies and TV shows, over and over again. This would be fine - if Disney did something, anything, interesting and new with it. But they don’t. He’s picked on by the popular kids, he embarrasses himself in public, manages to lose his pants, isn’t understood by his father, and has a group of friends which are also stereotypical outcasts.
First, there’s his best friend and eventual love interest, Abby Mallard (whom everyone calls Ugly Duckling). Of course, since unpopular nerds are funny, ugly kids must be funny, too. And what’s funnier than being ugly? Being fat! So another of Chicken Little’s friends (Runt of the Litter - a pig) is extremely fat. This gives Disney the opportunity to dust off every clichéd fat joke that they could find. And lastly, since Disney knows that foreigners are funny too, their other friend is Fish Out Of Water. Of course, being a fish, he either doesn’t talk much, or when he does nobody understands him. It’s painfully obvious this is meant to be the typical foreign exchange student stereotype. His mannerisms and “comedy” bits are right out of any number of teen “comedies” of the 80’s.
All of the jokes involving these characters are predictable, unfunny, unoriginal and bereft of any creative effort whatsoever. Come on Disney, this is animation! Do something with it! Don’t waste time by having the characters say as many different words for “pee” as they can, or doing karaoke to Spice Girls songs. (Just when was this written, anyway? The Spice Girls just seem like a dated, desperate reference. They’re not old enough to qualify as kitsch yet.)
Speaking of animation, there are some scenes that are so heavy-handed in their approach, that the filmmakers seem to be trying to beat you over the head with them. There is a scene where Chicken Little is talking to his dad in the car. And Chicken Little is sad. See how sad he is? He’s so sad, we’re going to sit here and watch him be sad for several minutes, just in case you didn’t catch on to the fact that he’s sad. And he’s going to hang his head, and look sad. This is amateurish writing, directing and animation at its worst. There is no hint of honest emotion, or any sincerity in the writing. It’s trite and almost insulting. Yes, we get the fact that he’s sad. Now get on with it. There are scenes throughout the movie that suffer from this. At times I can almost hear a nonexistent narrator saying, “And then Chicken Little looked sad”, or “And then Chicken Little looked determined!”. There’s no effort made to break away from the obvious, and make these characters unique or interesting individuals.
Disney also resorts to their time-honored tradition of Chicken Little having a single parent. Apparently, Chicken Little’s mom is now in a pot-pie on a store shelf somewhere, because his dad is left alone to raise him. Of course, his dad doesn’t understand or believe in Chicken Little, and Chicken Little can’t ever hope to live up to his dad’s accomplishments as a school athlete. Are they just pulling plot synopses off of TV now for their movies? Having a single parent isn’t done for any reason other than to bring “Instant Conflict™” to the story, without them having to actually work at it. Disney isn’t good enough to write a story involving two parents. After all, if they can’t create one interesting parent, how on Earth could they ever hope to create two?The plot itself, had some promise. Chicken Little thinks the sky is falling, because a piece of it fell out of the sky and landed on his head. Of course, no one saw it, and no one believed him. The twist here, is that a piece actually did fall on his head - a piece of an alien spaceship. Their ships can cloak themselves to look like the sky (or any other surroundings). Chicken Little and his friends discover the truth, and when they try to warn the townspeople, of course nobody believes them.
Now, this could have made for a fun, entertaining film. And the aliens are pretty cool looking characters. The problem is, it takes way too long to get to that point in the film, and when we get there, nothing terribly interesting happens anyway. There are a handful of funny moments, but more often than not, it’s all very predictable, and not very funny. What’s worse, is we really don’t care about any of the characters in the film, or what happens to them. Except maybe the little alien that befriends Chicken Little.
Throughout the film, the writers seem to be grasping for ideas. Anything they could use to fill up time seemed like a good idea. Nothing exemplifies this more than the fact that in the middle of this movie… is a sports movie.
It’s not that the characters go to a theater and watch a sports movie, but this movie becomes a sports movie. It completely shifts gears, and turns into a different film for awhile. But not just a sports movie, a Disney sports movie. So you can already see where this is heading. You should be able to recite the formula, even if you’ve never seen one of Disney’s sports movies. Baseball team has chance to win the pennant. Underdog (Chicken Little) who has never hit a baseball in his life and can barely lift the bat, is the only player who can come to bat. The team is one run behind, with one person on base, two outs, in the bottom of the ninth inning. Since Chicken Little is a known loser, everyone in the stadium groans. But he’s so short, all he has to do is stand there and not swing the bat to get a walk, then the hero (the stereotypical bratty popular kid) can come up and hit a home run. But of course, he swings at the ball twice, and misses badly. Everyone groans. The coach is screaming at him. But Chicken Little is determined (cue non-existant narrator) to hit the ball. Of course, he gets a hit, and due to the incompetence of the other team and his own dumb luck, he manages to beat the throw to home plate and win the game. Yay. Who would have ever seen that coming, right? (A big problem with the supposed tension here - since he got a hit and the person already on base scored, it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d gotten thrown out at home plate or not. The game would have been tied and gone to extra innings. Next time… try football.)
The sports movie is just there to make Chicken Little’s dad proud of him (cue narrator, “And Chicken Little’s dad was so proud of him!”). They did nothing interesting with it. Why not make a parody of a sports movie? Why not make it really funny? Why baseball? Why not something weird or just different? How about a Jai Alai tournament?Because it’s Disney. They have long since lost the ability to be creative.
After the screening, a couple of visual effects people who worked on the film did a Question and Answer session. One of the most telling stories they had was about how the director, Mark Dindal, approached the film. They would have test screenings, and Mark would sit next to the kids and “try to see the film through the eyes of a 12-year-old”. If there was something in the film that the test audience didn’t like, even if everyone who worked on the film liked it, they’d change it. This is the absolute worst way to make a film. If you are letting other people dictate to you what’s funny, then your film will not be funny! In order for humor to work, it has to be funny to the person writing it. If you’re making a film based on what you think other people will laugh at, then you’re just second-guessing your audience. This is what Chicken Little feels like. A mishmash of recycled ideas that someone thought might be funny to someone else. It feels shallow and dishonest. “Here’s a film. Marketing says you should like it. Go laugh at it. And buy the video for your kids.”
With Disney, filmmaking follows marketing. Focus groups and test audiences write the films, and that’s how the executives there want it. They don’t trust artists to make films. They have cultivated an environment of distrust, where the studio doesn’t trust the artists, and the artists aren’t allowed to trust themselves.
So, if Chicken Little is such bad film, why is it making money?Well, first of all, it’s not a bad film. The Flintstones is a bad film. Almost anything by Paul Verhoeven is a bad film. Chicken Little is a bland film. It’s dull, unfunny, predictable, and pointless. But it’s generally harmless, and the visuals are probably interesting enough to keep most people from walking out of the theater. It’s an eighty-minute baby-sitter, and that’s what most people who would go to it in the first place are after. Besides, when it came out, for two weeks there was absolutely no competition at the box office for its intended demographic.
Had it come out at the same time Harry Potter did, Chicken Little would have tanked. Mercilessly. Disney may not be very good at making films anymore, but they’re not completely stupid, either. Of course now, between Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia, Chicken Little is fading fast.
Disney released Chicken Little at a key moment when they stood a chance of making decent box-office. This is extremely important to Disney. Not because this is their “first” computer animated film (it’s not - Dinosaur was), it’s because they’re in negotiations with Pixar.
The better Chicken Little does, the better negotiating position Disney will be in with Pixar. The deals I’ve heard rumors of are either for a 3 picture deal or a 5 picture deal, with at least some of those being sequels. That Pixar and Disney will make a deal is almost a given. But the details of that deal - character ownership, box office percentages, home video percentages and merchandising - are going to hinge on how well Chicken Little does. If it does well, Disney will be under less pressure to make a deal with Pixar, and can get better terms. If it bombed, Disney would pretty much have to cave in to whatever Pixar wanted, because it would reinforce the idea that Disney can’t have a hit without them. Pixar has to make a deal with someone, since after Cars, they have no distributor. If they can’t make a deal with Disney, this will weaken their negotiating power with other distributors. So Pixar is almost stuck having to make a deal with them, in order to get anything even close to what they want. Besides, Pixar wants the Disney relationship to work out. Disney still has one of the best merchandising and marketing machines out there, and trying to duplicate that elsewhere would be next-to-impossible. (And Steve Jobs has a lot to gain with Apple and the iTunes video store by maintaining a relationship with Disney, too.)
So Chicken Little now stands at about $127 million. If they’re lucky, they may clear $150 million by the end of the holidays. That’s three times what their last animated feature - Home on the Range - brought in domestically. So that’s definitely an improvement over their last several box-office catastrophes, but it’s still $110 million less than The Incredibles, and less than half of what Finding Nemo brought in*. Disney can’t afford to let Pixar go just yet. Even if they get the short-end of the deal, money is still money, and in the end, that’s what matters to Disney the most.
I still think there will be a Pixar-Disney deal, and I think it will still be (mostly) favorable to Pixar. But Disney’s going to hold off until they’ve squeezed every last penny they can out of Chicken Little (including the DVD release).
I almost forgot to review the 3D aspect of Chicken Little. The movie was shown in 3D (digitally projected) and the technology worked well enough. The projector flickered the left and right images six times per frame, so it was fast enough not to be bothersome. The 3D glasses used polarized lenses (not red and blue), and were large enough to fit comfortably over my own glasses.
The problem was, the film wasn’t designed to be shown in 3D. The idea to make it 3D was made mere weeks before the film’s release, and the production was basically complete by that point. The film wasn’t rendered in true 3D, but was re-composited in 3D from pre-rendered 2D elements and some 3D geometry. The result was that objects had a solid enough look to them, but there wasn’t a great sense of depth to the environments. It was like the whole film was taking place inside of a box. So the 3D effects were negligible, for the most part. The filmmakers went back and re-did a number of shots to show off the 3D a little bit better, but those stuck out from the rest of the film and were jarring when they appeared. The filmmakers stated they plan to pursue this technology (or as the rest of us call it, a “gimmick”) in future films, and incorporate it from the outset, instead of just tacking it on at the last minute.
Maybe they should try incorporating a story next time, too.
* Source: Box Office Mojo
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