Chicken Little (2005 film)

In September 2001, director Mark Dindal developed the idea for Chicken Little, with its title character envisioned as an overreacting, doom and gloomy female chicken, that went to summer camp to build confidence so she wouldn't overreact, as well as repair her relationship with her father. At the summer camp, she would uncover a nefarious plot that her camp counselor, who was to be voiced by Penn Jillette, was planning against her hometown.[7] Dindal would later pitch his idea to Michael Eisner who suggested it would be better to change Chicken Little into a male because as Dindal recalled, "if you're a boy and you're short, you get picked on."[8]

In January 2003, when David Stainton became Disney's new president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, he decided the story needed a different approach, and told the director the script had to be revised, and during the next three months, it was rewritten into a tale of a boy, trying to save his town from space aliens.[9]

During the rewriting process, Dindal, along with three credited writers and nine others, threw out twenty-five scenes to improve the character development and add more emotional resonance with the parent-child relationship. Dindal admitted that "It took us about 2½ years to pretty much get back to where we started... But in the course of that, the story got stronger, more emotional, and funnier, too."[9][10]

When originally envisioned as a female character, Holly Hunter provided the voice for the title character for eight months, until it was decided for Chicken Little to be a male.[7] Against forty actors competing for the title role, Zach Braff auditioned where Dindal noted he "pitched his voice slightly to sound like a junior high kid. Right there, that was really unique — and then he had such great energy."[11] Michael J. Fox, Matthew Broderick, and David Spade (who previously starred in the Dindal directed The Emperor's New Groove) were originally considered for the role.[12]

In April 2002, Variety reported that Sean Hayes was to voice a character named the Ugly Duckling,[13] but the character was rewritten into a female.[14] Now conceived as Abby Mallard, Hunter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jodie Foster, Geena Davis, and Madonna were considered, but Joan Cusack won the role for her natural comedy.[15] In December 2003, it was announced Braff and Cusack were cast, along with other cast members including Steve Zahn, Amy Sedaris, Don Knotts, Katie Finneran, and Garry Marshall.[16]

Marshall was asked to provide a voice for Kingdom of the Sun, which was re-conceived into The Emperor's New Groove and directed by Dindal, but was removed from the project for being "too New York".[10] When he was approached to provide the voice for Buck Cluck, Marshall claimed "I said I don't do voices. You want a chicken that talks like me, fine. So they hired me and they didn't fire me, and it was like a closure on animation."[17]

Australian Comedian Mark Mitchell was hired to re-voice the character of Buck Cluck for the Australian release of the film. It had nothing to do with local content laws as they apply only to television and radio. It was simply a market-driven decision by Disney, which sought a local identity around whom to publicize the movie.[18]

To visualize this story, Disney selected 50 percent of its new CGI animation team from its 2D animation staff, and placed them through a rigorous eighteen-month training program, which included an introductory to Alias's Maya that would serve as the main 3D animation software used on the project. As some of the animators had worked on Dinosaur (2000), which used live-action backgrounds,[19] the animation team took inspiration for its staging, coloring, and theatrical lighting from Mary Blair's background designs featured in Peter Pan (1953), and Alice in Wonderland (1951).

For the aesthetics in the background designs, the background layout artists sparingly use digital matte paintings to render out the naturalistic elements, including the trees and the baseball diamond, but they were retouched using Adobe Photoshop as background cards featured in the film.[20] The lighting department would utilize the "Lumiere" software to enhance virtual lighting for the shading form and depth and geometric rendering for the characters' shadows,[21] as well as use real lighting to create cucaloris.[20]

For the characters' designs and animation style, Dindal sought to capture the "roundness" as seen in the Disney animated works from the 1940s to 1950s,[20] by which the characters' fluidity of motion was inspired from the Goofy cartoon How to Play Baseball (1942).[20] Under visual effects supervisor Steve Goldberg who spearheaded the department, the Maya software included the software program "Shelf Control" that provided an outline of characters that can be viewed on screen and provided a direct link to the controls for specific autonomy, as well as new electronic tablet screens were produced that allowed for the artists to draw digital sketches of the characters to rough out their movements, which was then transferred to the 3D characters.[21]

All of the characters were constructed using geometric polygons.[20] For the title character, there was approximately fourteen to fifteen character designs before settling the design composed of an ovular egghead shape with oversized glasses. The final character was constructed of 5,600 polygons, 700 muscles, and more than 76,000 individual feathers, of which 55,000 are placed on his head.[17]

Following the casting of Braff, supervising animator Jason Ryan adapted Braff's facial features during recording sessions to better combine the dorkiness and adorability the filmmakers desired. "He's got this really appealing face and eye expressions," Ryan said, adding that he was amazed by Braff's natural vocal abilities.[11] Next, the animators would utilize the software program "Chicken Wire", where digital wire deformers were provided for the animators to manipulate the basic geometric shapes to get their desired facial features. Lastly, a software development team constructed XGen, a computer software program for texturing the hair, cloth, feathers, and leaves.[21]

Accompanied with the theatrical release, Disney Consumer Products released a series of plush items, toys, activity sets, keepsakes and apparel.[30]

Chicken Little was first released on DVD on March 21, 2006, in a single disc edition.[31] The DVD contained the film accompanied with deleted scenes, three alternate openings, a making-of featurette, an interactive game, a karaoke sing along, two music videos, and animation test footage of the female Chicken Little.[32][33] The DVD sold over 2.7 million DVD units during its first week accumulating $48 million in consumer spending. Overall, consumer spending on its initial home video release grossed $142.6 million.[34] The film was released for the first time on Blu-ray on March 20, 2007, and contained new features not included on the DVD. A 3D Blu-ray version was released on November 8, 2011.[35]

A VHS version was also released, but only as a Disney Movie Club exclusive.

In its opening weekend, Chicken Little debuted at #1, being the first Disney animated film to do so since Dinosaur, taking $40 million and tying with The Lion King as the largest opener for a Disney animated film.[36] It also managed to claim #1 again in its second week of release, earning $31.7 million, beating Sony's sci-fi family film, Zathura.[37] The film grossed $135.4 million in North America, and $179 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $314.4 million.[4]

This reversed the slump that the company had been facing since 2000, during which time it released several films that underperformed, most notably Fantasia 2000 (1999), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), Treasure Planet (2002) and Home on the Range (2004). However, those films received better critical reception.[38][39]

Critical response aggregator, Rotten Tomatoes, reports that 37% of 160 surveyed critics gave positive reviews; the average score is 5.5/10. The critical consensus states: "Disney expends more effort in the technical presentation than in crafting an original storyline."[40] Another review aggretator, Metacritic, gave the film an average score of 48 based on 32 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[41] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A-" on an A+ to F scale.[42]

James Berardinelli, writing his review for ReelViews, gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four lambasting that "It is bogged down by many of the problems that have plagued Disney's recent traditional animated features: anonymous voice work, poor plot structure, and the mistaken belief that the Disney brand will elevate anything to a "must see" level for viewers starved for family friendly fare."[43] On the syndicated television program Ebert & Roeper, critics Richard Roeper and Roger Ebert gave the film "Two Thumbs Down" with the former saying "I don't care whether the film is 2-D, 3-D, CGI, or hand-drawn, it all goes back to the story."[44]

In his print review featured in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert stated the problem was the story, and wrote "As a general rule, if a movie is not about baseball or space aliens, and you have to use them, anyway, you should have started with a better premise." Ebert concluded his review with "The movie did make me smile. It didn't make me laugh, and it didn't involve my emotions, or the higher regions of my intellect, for that matter. It's a perfectly acceptable feature cartoon for kids up to a certain age, but it doesn't have the universal appeal of some of the best recent animation."[45]

Writing in The New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott stated the film is "a hectic, uninspired pastiche of catchphrases and clichés, with very little wit, inspiration or originality to bring its frantically moving images to genuine life."[46] Entertainment Weekly film reviewer Lisa Schwarzbaum, who graded the film a C, wrote that the "banality of the acorns dropped in this particular endeavor, another in a new breed of mass-market comedy that substitutes self-reference for original wit and pop songs for emotional content."[47]

However, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe gave the film a positive review saying the film was "shiny and peppy, with some solid laughs and dandy vocal performances".[48]

Angel Cohn of TV Guide gave the film 3 stars alluding the film that would "delight younger children with its bright colors and constant chaos, while adults are likely to be charmed by the witty banter, subtle one-liners, and a sweet father-son relationship."[49] Peter Rainer, writing in The Christian Science Monitor, graded the film with a A- applauding that the "visuals are irrepressibly witty and so is the script, which morphs from the classic fable into a spoof on War of the Worlds. I prefer this version to Spielberg's."[50]

The film received four Annie Award nominations, including Best Animated Feature, Best Animated Effects, Best Character Design, and Best Production Design in an Animated Feature Production, losing all to Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. At the 2005 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards it won: Worst Animated Film.