![]() Small wonder, I guess, that the film's jokey coda, which lampoons (but gently, gently) Hollywood's penchant for hyperbole, finds Runt transmogrified, Foxy Loxy-style, into a full bore pig of masculine action. Compare it to the salmon slaughter of Brother Bear as something you might think is stupid but that won't seem so innocuous to your children, who are smarter and more observant than you are about these things.Īdd to the weirdness an underused bitch-goddess villain, Foxy Loxy (Amy Sedaris), who's transformed into a Southern Belle by the alien's obliterating death ray, as well as a sidekick pig, Runt (Steve Zahn), who speaks in Air Supply lyrics, is inspired by an invocation of Gloria Gaynor's fag anthem "I Will Survive," is caught in the act of Spice Girls and Captain and Tennille karaoke, and is threatened with a grounding from his Streisand records for his bad behaviour. It's the equivalent of a shot in the background of any other picture with a man using another man-perhaps of another race-to clip the hedges. ![]() Of course no one believes him until it's too late, but instead of some politicized natural disaster, the falling sky forecasts a full-bore alien invasion massed against Little's sleepy, multi-species hamlet of Oakey Oaks where, in a disturbing throwaway moment, the anthropomorphized animals use a goat, wheelbarrow-style, as a lawnmower. You could by rights hope that it's is a send-up of the Fifties cycle of Martian invasion pictures (it name-checks War of the Worlds for no good reason) as The Incredibles was a send-up of Golden Age superhero comics, but even a cursory comparison between the two films shows that Disney's desperation to make Pixar's looming secession a non-issue is as limp and impotent as the Nevada State Boxing Commission.Ĭareful not to upset the applecart in any way, Chicken Little posits the titular fowl (voiced by Zach Braff) as a victim of cranial upset, twice pelted on the bean by pieces of the sky. What Chicken Little is more than anything else is exhausting. They're just there to give parents, alternately stunned and bored, a little rootless pleasure in the middle of epileptic flash what's left isn't clever (or kinetic) enough for us to ignore its essential emptiness. Chicken Little, for instance, makes pop culture references that don't mean anything in the context of a film whose sole purpose appears to be instructing your children to be fearful and hyper. Screenplay by Ron Anderson, Steve Bencich and Ron J.Friedmanīy Walter Chaw Frantic, frenetic, anxious, obnoxious: the ideal audience for Chicken Little should be in bed by seven, and Disney's umpteenth cry of "sure-fire comeback project" looks, appropriately, like another convulsive episode of corporate crying-wolf. ![]()
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