Chicken Little

A disjointed effort. Most of the story in this movie is squarely focused on entertaining pre-10-year-old viewers, yet the music cues continually reference songs that were mostly decades old by this film’s release date--that is, they're tunes that were current long before the target audience’s dates of birth. So, these are songs for adults in a flick made mostly for kids--not exactly well-thought-out moviemaking. Where there are contemporary--that is, mid-aughts--references, they only serve to make the work seem that much more dated to today’s viewers. Add to all of that a plot that seems awfully thin, with a story that undergoes a jarring shift in tone midway through, and the end result is a film that just feels poorly constructed from beginning to end. Even a good voice cast could only produce a few good laughs out of this material. And the computer generated animation, while impressive in some respects, lacks any clear appeal for the audience beyond the basics of presentation. Bottom line: I think this movie had no real chance from birth. The sky didn’t fall on the studio with this one, but the atmosphere around Burbank was getting dicey once more right about then.