Film Review Throwback- "Chicken Little"

I normally don't speak badly about Disney, but....God...

Chicken Little
Directed by Mark Dindal
Starring Zach Braff as Chicken Little, Joan Cusack as The Ugly Duckling, 
Gary Marshall as Buck Cluck, and Steve Zahn as Runt of The Litter

Once upon a time, in the early 2000's, Disney and Pixar were close to going their separate ways. Disney was abandoning traditional, hand-drawn animation, and was moving into producing their films in CGI animation like Pixar. The first film to come out of this time, was Chicken Little, and my God is it awful.

Taking place years after Chicken Little (Braff) has declared the sky is falling, he is now labeled a loser and a lunatic by the town, and his father (Marshall) shows nothing but resentment. Desperate for his peers' and father's approval, Chicken Little joins the school baseball team. He manages to score the winning home run, and is labeled a local hero. But when he discovers he was right about the sky, he must risk his newfound fame, and his father's approval, in order to save the world.

Somehow I believe, in an alternate universe, that bare-bone story could have worked, if the film took a different direction. But no, it takes about five other different directions, and the result is one mess of a film. This universe of anthropomorphic animals, and the jokes that are crafted from it, are not well developed. To add to that, all the pop culture gags and references come out of nowhere, and just aren't funny. If this film is in a universe dominated by personified by animals, how are they watching Raiders of The Lost Ark  or Star Wars? How do they know who Barbara Streisand is?

What's probably less forgiving, is this is film is kind of mean-spirited. The father and how he treats Chicken Little is hard to watch, and makes him a very unlikeable character. A lot of the side characters are very mean-spirited and unlikeable too. On the other side of the coin, Chicken Little's misfit friends, are very annoying, Steve Zahn in particular as Runt of The Litter. His character's sole purpose in this film is to burst out pop culture jokes that miss their mark every turn.

I'm surprised at the famous names they got for this film in addition to the ones already mentioned, such as Patrick Stewart, Don Knotts, Adam West, and Wallace Shawn. To be fair, their roles are small, and they work with what they're given. Zach Braff as Chicken Little is fine. It's not a stellar performance, but it's not problematic either. Joan Cusack as The Ugly Ducking is "okay". Gary Marshall as Chicken Little's father, Buck Cluck, is just not like-able at all.

From a time where computer-animated, comedy films like Shrek were popular, I see Chicken Little as the old guy (Disney) trying to fit in with the "cooler" younger crowd, and it is hard too watch. Thank goodness Disney stuck with Pixar and with what they do best, in films like Tangled, The Princess & The Frog, and to an extent Wreck-It Ralph. 

This film is a mess, riddled with annoying pop-culture references that don't belong in it, or in Disney in general. I mean for God's sake, the trailer was a Napoleon Dynamite homage and the DVD cover is a Men In Black homage! I would not recommend it to any Disney fan, animation fan, or even a parent looking to entertain their children for two hours. I remember when I was kid I watched it quite a lot. Rest assured if I could, I would travel back in time, and slap myself for it...