Chicken Little
Jan. 8th, 2022 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archer“You know, I think I know why no one on Tumblr references this movie,” Julie commented, as we watched Chicken Little. “It’s the crushing secondhand embarrassment of the viewing experience.”
Now, the movie does have certain charms. Julie and I were both enchanted by Chicken Little’s friend Fish, a fish who walks around with a fishbowl over his head so he can breathe, who is clearly living his best life. No matter what’s happening - survival of the fittest dodgeball in gym class; accidentally snuck onto an alien spacecraft - Fish finds a way to have fun with it.
And I also enjoyed Chicken Little’s romance with his friend Abby Mallard, a.k.a. the Ugly Duckling, a name that implies she will blossom out into a beautiful swan - but in fact they get together while Abby is still weird and gawky looking and Chicken Little is still half her size. Neither of them gets a makeover and/or a growth spurt! They fall in love exactly as they are!
(The movie ends with a hilarious movie-within-a-movie about the alien adventures of Chicken Little and Friends, in which Chicken Little has been cast as a buff Captain Kirk type - voiced by Adam West, a.k.a. 1960s Batman - and Abby has been cast as a gorgeous lady duck.)
But it has to be said that Chicken Little also DOES contain a fairly heaping portion of secondhand embarrassment. Moreover, this secondhand embarrassment is frontloaded into the first twenty minutes, probably causing many sensitive viewers to bail before we get past the mortifying “the sky is falling! The sky is falling!” routine to the part where we discover that the falling sky is in fact a panel that has fallen off an alien spaceship.
I suspect that this is a large part of the reason why this movie, like many movies Disney made in the late nineties and early 2000s, has been more or less memory-holed. I further suspect that the failure of these movies, not so much in terms of money-making (Chicken Little was the second-highest-grossing animation film of 2005) but in capturing the cultural imagination, is why Disney clings so stubbornly to formula in, for instance, the Marvel franchise. Why go off the beaten track if no one is going to meme your adorable dancing fish character?
Now, the movie does have certain charms. Julie and I were both enchanted by Chicken Little’s friend Fish, a fish who walks around with a fishbowl over his head so he can breathe, who is clearly living his best life. No matter what’s happening - survival of the fittest dodgeball in gym class; accidentally snuck onto an alien spacecraft - Fish finds a way to have fun with it.
And I also enjoyed Chicken Little’s romance with his friend Abby Mallard, a.k.a. the Ugly Duckling, a name that implies she will blossom out into a beautiful swan - but in fact they get together while Abby is still weird and gawky looking and Chicken Little is still half her size. Neither of them gets a makeover and/or a growth spurt! They fall in love exactly as they are!
(The movie ends with a hilarious movie-within-a-movie about the alien adventures of Chicken Little and Friends, in which Chicken Little has been cast as a buff Captain Kirk type - voiced by Adam West, a.k.a. 1960s Batman - and Abby has been cast as a gorgeous lady duck.)
But it has to be said that Chicken Little also DOES contain a fairly heaping portion of secondhand embarrassment. Moreover, this secondhand embarrassment is frontloaded into the first twenty minutes, probably causing many sensitive viewers to bail before we get past the mortifying “the sky is falling! The sky is falling!” routine to the part where we discover that the falling sky is in fact a panel that has fallen off an alien spaceship.
I suspect that this is a large part of the reason why this movie, like many movies Disney made in the late nineties and early 2000s, has been more or less memory-holed. I further suspect that the failure of these movies, not so much in terms of money-making (Chicken Little was the second-highest-grossing animation film of 2005) but in capturing the cultural imagination, is why Disney clings so stubbornly to formula in, for instance, the Marvel franchise. Why go off the beaten track if no one is going to meme your adorable dancing fish character?
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Date: 2022-01-08 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-08 02:49 pm (UTC)