My Thoughts on “Chicken Little 🐓” (2005)

 

(This is the poster for Chicken Little 🐓 (2005).)  

Is the sky falling or is it just an acorn? Whatever it is, it is definitely one little slip. There, I managed to include at least three references to the movie in one sentence. Or does the sky falling or acorn one count as one reference, so it’d just be two? I don’t know 🤷‍♂️. But yeah, this is my second Disney review in a row. If I review Tron (1982) or Tron: Legacy this month, then it’ll be three or four. I don’t know which one I’ll review first, or even I’ll even review both of them or just one of them. I also wrote a post about the trailer to Predator: Badlands, and that’s technically a Disney movie even if it’s not being released under the Disney label but rather the Twentieth Century Studios label. And if I repost my Prey (2022) review, then it’ll be four or five, but I think I’ll hold off on that until June. I guess, May’s shaping up to be a Disney month for me, and I totally didn’t plan it. 

 

I decided to review Chicken Little 🐓 (2005) right after reviewing Lilo & Stitch (2002), because it’s a childhood favorite of mine just like that movie, it was on my list of things to review, and I saw it on Disney+ and decided to kill two birds with one stone and review them back-to-back, just to get it out of the way. So, I won’t have to worry about it later on. I’ve got many other things to review after that, many other posts that I want to write, so might as well rewatch it and review it now since I have access to it. I don’t even have access to all movies, TV shows, and video games that I have on my list, so when an opportunity arises, I best take it or else, I might lost it. That mindset can apply to anything really, not just reviewing things for a blog on the Internet 🛜. So sit back, get your reading glasses 👓 (if you need reading glasses 👓, and let’s find out what this little chicken 🐓 is up to and if he’s just paranoid and delusional or if he is really onto something. 

Well, if you’ve seen the movie before, you already know the basic plot. Chicken Little 🐓 warns the town of Oakey Oaks that the sky is falling, only for it to turn out to just be an acorn…or is it? He’s humiliated on local TV, becomes a laughing stock, they try to make a movie mocking him for his “mistake,” and then he spends the rest of the movie trying to prove himself and trying to make people forgot about his “mistake.” I put mistake is quotes because as it turns out halfway through the movie, Chicken Little 🐓 was right all along, a piece of the sky really did fall on him (it wasn’t an acorn), and everyone else who made fun of him and said he was crazy, or even stupid, was an asshole. I mean, they’d all still be assholes even he wasn’t right. With the exception of Chicken Little 🐓’s friends, Abby, Runt, and Fish, and maybe even his dad, Buck Cluck, everyone in this town is a jerk. 

 

They walk away from him whenever he’s just walking on the sidewalk, they mock him to his face, they have board games based on him, they have bumper stickers, they even tried to make a movie based on him, mocking him for his apparent “mistake.” And pretty much every adult shows their visible disdain for him by practically groaning every time they say his name 😒, putting as much stank on it as they can. Like, I get it guys, you’re mad at this kid for causing a mass panic over what seems to you like a silly misunderstanding, but you don’t have to be that mean to him. It’s for this reason that people have accused this movie of being “mean-spirited” and even if I don’t entirely agree with that assessment, I do see where it’s coming from. 

 

The movie does have some dark jokes too, like there’s a scene with a news report after Chicken Little 🐓’s failed second warning about the aliens 👽, showing a bunch of lemmings (they’re all supposed to be kids I think), who all start throwing themselves off of a park bench in a mass panic since they don’t have a cliff to jump off of. Which is not true, lemmings don’t actually commit mass suicide and jump off of cliffs together just because the other is doing it, that was a myth created and perpetuated by Disney. They lied to you. There’s even a scene where they start talking about pee after Abby mentions that mistook frozen pee from an airliner ✈️ for something from outer space. With everything that’s in it, it’s honestly amazing that this movie’s rated G. If it were made today, it’d probably be rated PG, just like every other kid’s movie nowadays, because the MPA is just lazy like that. But, that being said, it’d probably have a more legitimate reason to be rated PG than some of these other animated kid’s movies that were slapped with a PG rating. 

This was Disney’s first 3D animated movie that they made completely by themselves, without Pixar. They didn’t even fully own Pixar by the time that this came out. The main reason they just jump onto CG and do a fully 3D animated movie was that their last few 2D animated movies didn’t do too well. With the exception of Lilo & Stitch and Brother Bear 🐻, most of the 2D animated movies that they released in the post-Renaissance era in the early-to-mid 2000s were either box office bombs 💣 or box office disappointments, meaning they weren’t outright failures but fell way below expectations. On top of that, other studios’ 2D animated film projects weren’t doing too well at the box office either. Meanwhile, Pixar was killing it. Every movie they released during this same period was hit after hit. This was Pixar’s golden age. 

 

And Disney wanted in on some of that money 💵, and they didn’t want to just settle for buying Pixar altogether, they wouldn’t do that for a few years when Bob Iger takes over. He’s the one that wants to buy this way to success and eliminate the competition by buying the competition 😁. So, they decided to gut their 2D animation department and shift almost entirely to 3D. They wouldn’t make another 2D animated movie until The Princess and the Frog 🐸 in 2009. For their first 3D animated feature, they were going to make a movie called My Peoples, but that project was shelved in favor of this one. Which is another reason why people hate and resend this movie. So, Chicken Little 🐓, and our ol’ boy ♂︎, Chicken Little 🐓 ended up being the first 3D animated Disney movie, though it too went through some changes before it was released. Originally, Chicken Little 🐓 was going to be a girl ♀︎ (and possibly go under the name, Henny Penny 🐓, though that’s not 100% certain), and was going to be voiced by Holly Hunter (the same actress who voiced Elastigirl/Helen Parr in the Incredibles movies as well as play June Finch in Batman v Superman), but at some point, they decided to make her a boy ♂︎, and have him be voiced by Zach Braff. 

 

The reason for changing the character from a girl ♀︎ to a boy ♂︎ was that the filmmakers (as well as Michael Eisner) felt that a boy ♂︎ would get bullied for being short more than a girl ♀︎ would, but also because Disney felt that boys ♂︎ wouldn’t go see a movie with a female protagonist ♀︎. Something that, in retrospect, people say was a mistake and was one of the reasons why the movie wasn’t good. But, it’s not as if the director, Mark Dindal doesn’t agree with you, he does. He recognizes that Disney’s assumptions about what boys ♂︎ would see were wrong since Frozen ❄️ made $1 billion 💵, and it would’ve never made that amount had boys ♂︎ not gone to see it as well as girls ♀︎, despite it having a female protagonist ♀︎. 

 

But, whatever, Chicken Little 🐓 was a boy ♂︎, and that’s the movie we got and a lot of people hated it 😠, even if it was technically profitable. It made $314 million 💵 at the worldwide box office against a $150 million budget 💵, and was the second highest grossing animated film of 2005 after Madagascar 🇲🇬, which actually got a sequel and became a franchise whereas this didn’t. Their next 3D animated movie was Meet the Robinsons, which was a box office bomb 💣. Meet the Robinsons also had a $150 million budget 💵, but only made $170.5 million 💵 worldwide. So, not good 😬. And then there was The Wild 🦁, which actually came out before Meet the Robinsons. It came out in 2006, while Meet the Robinsons came out the year after, in 2007, one of the best years for movies and pop culture in general.  

 

The Wild 🦁 was Disney’s attempt competing with DreamWorks’s Madagascar 🇲🇬, and many consider it a ripoff of Madagascar 🇲🇬, even though it probably wasn’t. It had a very similar concept to Madagascar 🇲🇬, where a bunch of zoo animals from New York end up in the wild through some unlikely circumstances. It even features a couple of the same animals like lion 🦁 and a giraffe 🦒, though it shook things up with a koala 🐨, an anaconda, and a squirrel 🐿️. There’s even a sewer gator 🐊 that they befriend along the way while they’re looking for the main character’s son. That’s another thing, the reason why the animals go to the wild is both the same and different at the same time. They both initially leave the zoo to go look for someone and bring them back home to the zoo, but rather than it being one of their friends like in Madagascar 🇲🇬, it’s one of their children, specifically the lion 🦁’s son. So, the movie doesn’t just share similarities with Madagascar 🇲🇬, but Finding Nemo as well. 

 

Despite costing less than both Chicken Little 🐓 and Meet the Robinsons, with an $80 million budget 💵, The Wild 🦁 was still a flop, a pretty bad one. It only made $102.3 million 💵 at the worldwide box office, and was largely panned by critics, the few who did actually see it. It was ignored by audiences, it wouldn’t have flopped so hard if it wasn’t, and it was very quickly forgotten about. It likely flopped because people just saw it as a cheap knockoff of Madagascar 🇲🇬 (which it kind of was), and calculated that it was not worth their time or money 💵. Parents thought, “I’m not taking my kids to this. I already took them to see Madagascar 🇲🇬 last year and that movie looked way better than this movie does. It looks like a cheap direct-to-DVD 📀 movie that somehow got a theatrical release.” Which yeah, it totally does. It looks like one of this cheap mockbuster animated movies that you see get released on DVD 📀 (not even Blu-Ray 💿, just DVD 📀) to try to cash-in 💵 on a more popular and well made animated movie, by some no-name studio from a foreign country. Except, it wasn’t. It was put out by a major studio that everyone knows by name globally, it had an $80 million budget 💵, and it had several big name actors in the voice cast that people would actually recognize. But the fact that it does look like a cheap direct-to-DVD 📀 ripoff movie despite that is a huge indictment of the whole movie in general. 

 

That is of course, if they were even aware of it in the first place since Disney did very little advertising for it, likely because even they lost faith in it at some point. I’m surprised that it wasn’t released in January since that’s often a dumping ground for movies studios have no faith in. Even I sort of forgot about it, since I forgot to mention it in this section about Disney’s early 3D animated output, and I forgot this this was 3D animated movie that came after Chicken Little 🐓, not Meet the Robinsons, and I had to edit this part talking about it in after the fact. That’s how forgettable this movie, though I’ll have to see if it is worth forgetting about if I ever decide to review it for myself. So, Disney’s first few attempt at fully 3D CG animated films didn’t go as well as they planned, neither did their second or the third 🙄, but was it really as bad as a lot of people have made it out to be? Was it really a recipe for disaster? I don’t think so. 

 

Yes, even after rewatching this movie after so many years, I still do enjoy it, and I enjoy it fairly unironically. Sure, I make jokes about it, I’ve been doing it a lot throughout this review, but it comes from a place of love. I’m not trying to mock or make fun of the movie because I think it’s bad, I don’t think it’s bad. It has flaws, sure, but none of detract from the movie for me. A lot of people didn’t like how the townsfolk, the residents of Oakey Oaks were so mean to Chicken Little 🐓, how all of them, even the adults decided to make fun of this kid, and yeah, they’re right, the townspeople (or townsanimals since they’re not humans, they’re all anthropomorphic animals), are mean to Chicken Little 🐓 and that’s the point. They’re supposed to be mean to him, to make Chicken Little 🐓 feel isolated and ostracized from society, the whole point of this version of the character is that he’s an outcast and an outcast because of a mistake everyone else think he made, even if it turns out later that it wasn’t a mistake at all. 

 

It’s so that the audience can relate to him, sympathize with him, and root for him when he tries to redeem himself in the eyes of the town by becoming a baseball star ⚾️ and later saves the town from an alien invasion 👽. And it does accurately reflect how society is in real life. People are assholes, and society as a whole can be your worst enemy, and even when it isn’t your worst enemy, it is certainly no help to you. Society either just ignores your problem or makes it way worse. So, this movie was true to life by making the townspeople all jerks. I mean, the townspeople in SpongeBob 🧽 are all jerks too, and yet no one really complains or pearl clutches about that. It would’ve been real science fiction had the townspeople all been nice and friendly to Chicken Little 🐓 and his friends and his dad because believe or not, they’re mean to his dad too, especially at the beginning of the third act when he’s getting all those angry phone calls from angry residents and even getting hate mail. 

That’s another thing people didn’t really like either, or at least thought was strange, the genre flip that this movie makes at the halfway point, where it goes from being a feel good sports movie about a kid redeeming himself by becoming a baseball star ⚾️ like his dad did when he was his age to being a full on science fiction movie about aliens 👽. But, I honestly think that’s one of the movies best qualities. I do like that it bends genres, and goes from being one thing to being another thing entirely, it makes feel more dynamic and unique amongst other Disney films. I wish that the company would make more genre bending movies like this and have it start out as one thing and become something else halfway through or towards the beginning or towards the end. But, the company lacks creativity nowadays, and they’re averse to trying new things like this. I mean, they keep remaking all of their old animated films in live action, including ones they already remade like The Jungle Book. They already did a live action remake of that in 1994 with Jason Scott Lee as Mowgli, but still remade it again anyway in 2016 with Bill Murray voicing Baloo 🐻, as well as Idris Elba voicing Shere Khan 🐅, Ben Kingsley voicing Bagheera, and Christopher Walken voicing King Louise 🦧. 

 

It’s also a great new spin on the ol’ Chicken Little 🐓 fable. Like, in the fable, Chicken Little 🐓 was wrong, it was just an acorn, and the sky wasn’t falling, and the whole lesson of the fable was don’t cause a mass panic based on nothing. It’s a very similar to The Boy Who Cried Wolf ♂︎🐺. Chicken Little 🐓 even went under the name, Henny Penny 🐓 in the original fable because the character was a hen 🐓 originally instead of a rooster 🐓. But here, the filmmakers went, “What if Chicken Little 🐓 was right, what if the sky really was falling,” and decided to make it a science fiction movie where he saves the world from an alien invasion 👽. Since, that’s really the only way they could do a version of the story where Chicken Little 🐓 was right, unless they made it an asteroid impact ☄️, which would’ve been cool too. But, before it went full sci-fi, they decided to lure the audience into a sort of false sense of security by having it start as a sports movie. Even going as far as including as many sports movie clichés as they could. And then bam! the sci-fi elements hit you just like that one “piece of the sky” hit Chicken Little 🐓 in the head, which later turns out to be just a faulty panel one of the aliens’ 👽 spaceships 🛸. Paying homage to 50s sci-fi movies, and also Signs…maybe? What with that whole crop circle scene. 

 

And I gotta be honest with you, I don’t think I would’ve liked this movie as I was and still am if it had just remained a sports movie the whole time. I probably would’ve lost interest right away and been bored the whole time because I’m not that into sports movies. The only way I’d watch a sports movie is if it had sci-fi elements like this, or that one movie that Brandon Tenold reviewed a month ago, The Blood of Heroes 🩸, or if the tropes and clichés of sports movies were applied to a different kind of movie, like Top Gun. That movie’s pretty much a sports movie but with fighter jets instead of actual sports, except that one volleyball scene 🏐 that people use as an example to prove that the movie is unintentionally gay 🏳️‍🌈⚣. I like racing movies, racing movies are fine, but I consider those different from sports movies. Sports movies I consider anything involving balls (basketball 🏀, football 🏈, soccer ⚽️, baseball ⚾️, golf ⛳️, even bowling 🎳) or anything involving fighting (professional boxing 🥊, MMA, and professional wrestling, maybe even fencing 🤺 too). There are some similarities between sports movies and racing movies, but there are ultimately different. I’d play sports video games as well as racing games, especially those of the Mario variety, but I draw the line at sports movies. 

The thing that I like about the alien invasion 👽 in this is that it’s caused by a misunderstanding. It’s even implied pretty early on that the aliens 👽 are friendly and are not simply attacking of pure malice, since Fish is so nonchalant and casual about them, and wanting to go back to them even as the others are scared. Presumably, they were friendly to him, and even sort of taught him their language since he’s able to talk to the alien kid 👽 and interpret it for the other characters. The aliens 👽 land on Earth 🌎 every year to collect acorns because Oakey Oaks has the best acorns in the universe (they took that sign a little too literally), and on one of their trips, a piece of their ship 🛸 (one of their camouflage paneling that can blend into any environment and make the ship 🛸 entirely invisible) fell off and landed on Chicken Little 🐓, triggering his first outburst where he tried to warn the town that the sky was falling, only for him to be humiliated and become seen as the town idiot or town lunatic.  Then a year later, the aliens 👽 return to get some more acorns, and that same panel that dropped on Chicken Little 🐓 last time drops on him again, and that leads to much the same thing where he tries to warn everybody only for the aliens 👽 before the rest of the townspeople can see it. 

 

Only this time, their son wanders out of the ship 🛸, following Chicken Little 🐓 and his friends while they were being chased by them (the parents), and ends up being stranded on Earth 🌎 E.T.-style (or Mac and Me-style if you prefer), having to stay with Chicken Little 🐓 and his friends. This angers the alien parents 👽 🤬, believing that their son was kidnapped, and they decide to launch a full-scale invasion of Earth 🌎 to try to get their son back. And they only stop invading after Chicken Little 🐓 and Buck Cluck manage to get their son back to them in one piece, and their son, who’s named Kirby BTW, convinces them to stop invading and that he wasn’t kidnapped and Chicken Little 🐓 and his dad are innocent. 

 

They even straight up say that had they not been given their son back, and had they not been told that the whole situation was a misunderstanding, they would have destroyed Earth 🌎. So, props to Chicken Little 🐓 and his dad for saving the day, otherwise they would’ve been vaporized. It’s even implied that it’s more of the dad who overreacted and wasn’t listening to reason, as the mom is shown as being the more levelheaded one. Sort of like what Chicken Little 🐓’s family situation is like with his dad and his dead mom, who we never really find out how she died, just that she died. It’s totally in line with the themes that the movie was going, the message about misunderstandings, mistakes, second chances, and the perils of parenting (single or otherwise). This would make for a good Father’s Day movie actually, even if I am doing this in May instead of June. But, at least I’m early with it unlike Mother’s Day. I didn’t even review a movie for Mother’s Day this year, but I will review one next year (hopefully, if there isn’t a Third World War or a Second American Civil War 🇺🇸 by then and we all die), when I review one of my mom’s favorite movies, City of Angels (1998). Either that, or French Kiss 🇫🇷💋 (1995). And then, for next year’s Father’s Day, I’ll do one of my dad’s favorite movies, Hackers. 

That’s another thing a lot of people hated about this movie when it came out and in the years that followed, they didn’t like Buck Cluck and thought that he was a bad parent. In fact, some have even gone as far as to call him the worst parent and the worst dad in Disney animated film in history or even in film history in general. I don’t know about that, I can think of plenty of movie dads as well as dads in real life that are way worse than Buck Cluck. I think people are overreacting when they say Buck Cluck is the worst dad in Disney history or the worst dad in film history. Yes, Buck Cluck is a bad dad, he does make a lot of mistakes, but that’s the point. The movie is fully aware of the fact that Buck Cluck is failing as a dad, that he handled the situation with the “sky is falling” warning and the acorn the wrong way. It’s not trying to excuse those actions or that behavior, or say that it’s okay. It is criticizing it. 

 

The whole movie really is about Buck Cluck learning to be a better father, albeit through adversity, through an intense situation that no other dad in any other situation would have to deal with. They make it very clear that Buck’s inadequacies as a parent stem from his wife’s death and his inability to adapt or move past it. They imply that the mother was the better parent of the two, she was the more active parent of the two, and knew how to talk to their son and help him through tough situations better than he could. He was possibly always at the work, being the primary breadwinner or even sole breadwinner of the household, while the wife handled most of, if not all, of the child rearing. In the scene when they return to the house after Buck talks to the principal about what happened at the gym in school, he looks at family picture of the three of them together, and he says something along the lines of, “If you were still here, you’d know what to do.” 

 

It’s also implied that he’s somewhat introverted and is kind of shy and doesn’t know how to talk to people, certainly doesn’t know how to talk to his son, since he struggles to put the words together when him and Chicken Little 🐓 are having their one-on-one conversation in the movie theater during the climax of the film, the main advice he gives him after the acorn incident is to just lay low and not call attention to himself. He’s also the kind of person (or animal I guess since they’re not humans) who caves to societal pressure, who gives into peer pressure, and does seek some level of external validation and wants to fit in and be accepted by his community. And when the whole town turns on him and his son for something his son did, he doesn’t know how to react, and panics, and chooses to embrace what they’re saying about his son rather than stick up for his son and become more of an outcast. That’s why he’s so apologetic towards the townspeople, and talking about being embarrassed, because he was embarrassed, and he wants the townspeople to forgive him, even if they don’t really, especially the second time when Chicken Little 🐓 warns the town again only for there to be nothing yet again. He wants to be accepted by them because I guess he feels that if the town accepts him and his son, then they’ll have the best life because no one will hate them or give them problems. 

 

But, by the end of the movie, when they have their heart-to-heart talk with one another, and Chicken Little 🐓 actually tells him how he feels, he sees the error of his ways, and works to become a better father. To support his son, no matter what, even if the town turns against him, which they don’t this time since Chicken Little 🐓 was proven right and they saved the town from the invasion. But, even when he was being a bad dad, I never thought that he went too far to where he was irredeemable. It’s like with the mean-spirited thing, I never felt that it was too far that it made the movie unpleasant to watch. The movie is still entertaining and enjoyable to watch, and those things that people complain about serve the story and never detract from the enjoyment or entertainment value of the movie. 

One thing I did notice about the movie was how fast paced it was. It’s an incredibly fast paced movie, it was moving at lightning speed. Like, Lilo & Stitch didn’t even go by as fast as this movie did, and that movie has a similar runtime to this. Same thing with WALL•E, or Ratatouille, or Pixar’s movie from this year (2005), The Incredibles, which was also directed by Brad Bird. It was the Pixar movie he directed before Ratatouille. I guess I’ve gotten so used to seeing movies that are over 2 hours long, that when I watch a movie that’s an hour or under an hour long, it feels really short. It felt like the movie was spending past all the school drama and sports drama stuff to get to the sci-fi stuff, and when it does get to the sci-fi stuff, it does slow down a bit and isn’t as fast paced. I don’t know if anyone else noticed this, especially by people who like me who grew up with it and are rewatching it as an adult purely because of nostalgia. 

 

And while I do like to focus on story and characters in my reviews, especially animated reviews, the animation is still pretty good, it does still hold up for the most part, though there are a few spots where it doesn’t hold well and doesn’t look that good. It’s mostly in the beginning, and does improve as the movie goes on, but there are moments where the animation shows its age and is a bit stiff in some places. The stiffness is noticeable especially because the animation, when it looks its best, is very fluid and very cartoony, utilizing a lot of squash and stretch techniques from 2D animation and applying it to 3D animation. They also reuse a shot twice minutes apart from each other during the dodgeball scene in the gym. You can definitely tell that this was Disney’s first time doing a fully CG animated film (didn’t quite go as smoothly as either Pixar or DreamWorks’s first time), they hadn’t quite got the hang of it quite yet. 

The movie also has a killer soundtrack, it uses music pretty effectively I would say. It has plenty of great tracks, whether it’s the Barenaked Ladies song “One Little Slip” at the beginning, or “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls, or “Stir It Up” by Joss Stone and Patti LaBelle, or even “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” by R.E.M.. But my favorite uses of music in this movie has to be “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” the Diana Ross version, and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee, both of which are used at the end of the movie, with “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” being used in the final scene in the movie theater with the “true story” of Chicken Little 🐓 (they still made a movie about him only they made it a sci-fi action movie where he’s a badass voiced by Adam West), and “Don’t Breaking My Heart” being used in the end credits and sung by the main cast. That whole credits dance sequence was pretty nice, and actually want to stay for the credits. It remains me a lot of the end credits dance sequence in An Extremely Goofy Movie, which is probably what the one in this movie was inspired by. They even did an original song for this movie by none other than the Cheetah Girls 🐆♀︎ (yes, those Cheetah Girls 🐆♀︎) called “Shake a Tail Feather 🪶.” It’s pretty good 👍, give a listen 👂🙂. 

 

Fun fact, or I guess not-so-fun fact, for all you movie and comedy fans out there, this was actually Don Knotts’s last movie before he died. Well, it’s technically his last movie when he was still alive as he died before the film’s release, and his actual last movie, Air Buddies, was released posthumously. If you’re someone who was born after 1995 and have no idea who Don Knotts was, or if you do know who Don Knotts was, but don’t know which role he played in this movie, he voiced the mayor, Turkey Lurkey 🦃, who is a pretty funny character. A great parody or satire of stereotypical politicians, who only does things when he reads them off of cue cards and is otherwise completely useless. I mean, he tried to bribe the aliens 👽 with Tic Tacs (nice Tic Tac product placement BTW). 

 

BTW, since I mentioned that “true story” movie that they show the characters watching at the end of the movie, I almost forgot to mention that they actually made a video game based on that movie-within-a-movie, called Disney’s Chicken Little: Ace in Action 🐓. It was released in 2006, a year after the movie came out, and was available on PS2, Nintendo DS, Wii, and Windows PC. It’s set after the events of the film as you can imagine, and is probably the closest thing to a sequel that we’re ever going to get. They even got all the voice actors from the movie to reprise their roles in the game, including the ones from the “movie versions” of the characters, namely Adam West, who was making all sorts of animated appearances in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. 

 

Whether it was guest starring in The Fairly OddParents as Catman, guest starring in the original Rugrats as the character Captain Blasto, guest starring in The Simpsons as a fictionalized version of himself, guest starring in Family Guy as a fictionalized version of himself called Mayor Adam West, or guest starring as the young Mermaid Man in SpongeBob SquarePants 🧽, or doing a voiceover cameo in this movie as the fictionalized and exaggerated version of Chicken Little 🐓 who goes by the nickname, “Ace,” and returning to reprise that role for this game. 

 

The only voice actor who didn’t return was Steve Zahn, instead they got someone else to voice the “real” version of Runt in the “real world” scenes. I think they got Roger Craig Smith to voice him in the game, as well as the other game, and even in that cancelled TV series they were also planning on making, according to this one comment I saw but I don’t know if that’s true or not. I hope so because I like Roger Craig Smith. He was my favorite English voice for Chris Redfield. He also voiced Sonic on numerous occasions, and voiced numerous characters on Regular Show (some major, but mostly minor background characters), a show I used to watch but don’t anymore. It’s honestly amazing that this movie got a video game at all considering how it was received. But, the game was probably already in development before the movie came out and received mixed reviews from both critics and audiences. But, from what it seems, it seems like people do genuinely like this game, and even like it more than the actual movie. There was also another Chicken Little 🐓 game that was released the same year as the movie and followed the same plot as the movie, but that one is way less interesting to talk about than the Ace in Action game.

 

 

 

 

 

(This is the cover art as well as a promotional image for Chicken Little: Ace in Action 🐓 on the PS2.)

 

 

 

 

I have noticed that people have somewhat softened on this movie and aren’t as harsh on it as they used to be. Like, people aren’t hating on it and saying it’s one of the worst animated movies ever made or that it’s one of the worst Disney movies ever made like they used to, and are more or less accepting it and enjoying it for what it is. I have seen a movement to enjoy this movie in a sort of “so bad it’s good” kind of way, like to ironically enjoy it in the same way people do Bee Movie 🐝. Some people have even said that this movie felt more like a DreamWorks movie than a Disney, like I saw one comment on video about Chicken Little 🐓 say that it’s “the most DreamWorks movie Disney has ever made. And yeah, I can see that. It does sort of feel like the sort of movie DreamWorks Animation would make during this same period. 

 

It does have that sort of style DreamWorks Animation movies had back then, it has that DreamWorks humor™, something that’s more satirical, snarky, more sardonic, more pop culture referential. This movie has a lot of pop culture references, more than what you would see in Disney animated movie back then, or even now. It’s like 30 or 40% of the humor in this movie is just pop culture references and maybe like 5% crude humor with that pee joke, that burp joke, and then the scene at the beginning where Chicken Little 🐓 loses his pants 👖 (really shorts 🩳) and is in his underwear (tidy-whities). So, that is one way it is more like a DreamWorks movie than a Disney movie. Some people even referred to it as “Disney’s Bee Movie 🐝.” I wouldn’t go that far since I do actually like this movie in an unironic way and I don’t it’s actually bad. Not perfect, certainly flawed, but not bad. It’s also not as memeable as Bee Movie 🐝 unfortunately, that is one thing I’ll say against the movie. Though this movie does have plenty of funny and weird moments, intentional and unintentional just like Bee Movie 🐝 did. 

Speaking of weird moments, a lot of people didn’t like what happened to Foxy Loxy 🦊 at the end of this movie. Essentially, what happens to her in this film is that she zapped by the aliens 👽 and sent to this place inside the alien spacecraft 👽 that sort of looks like how the Phantom Zone looked in the Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve Superman movies, and after everything’s resolved, everyone gets sent back, but when the aliens 👽 sent Foxy Loxy 🦊 back, her atoms ⚛️ got scrambled or something and her whole entire personality changed. Going from being a mean and rowdy tomboy type character to being a girlie girl ♀︎ with blonde curly hair, a pink dress, caked on makeup, and a Southern accent that makes her sound like Dolly Parton (more on her later). To their credit, the aliens 👽 do offer to put her back the way she was, but Runt steps in and says, “No, she’s perfect 😍” and then proceeds to start dating her, weirding out everyone including the aliens 👽 themselves. 

Now, a lot of people hated this because she was essentially changed against her will, this was something the aliens did to mess with the Earthlings 🌎 while they were still at war with them and believed that they kidnapped their son, and instead of changing her back, some people have even said she was essentially lobotomized, Runt decides to keep her that way because he finds her attractive that way than the other way. And yeah, it certainly does make Runt look bad. I didn’t think much of this when I was a kid, but now I can see why this is disturbing and wrong. Like, way to make one of your most sympathetic and lovable characters into one of the most unsympathetic and hatable characters. People hate Runt for doing this, and see him as the real villain of the movie. Some people even hate the movie as a whole for having this happen and presenting it as a positive or okay thing instead of as something morally wrong and detestable. It’s so weird that the writers decided to go in this direction with the characters and thought it was morally okay for Runt to do this and have a relationship with this fake altered version of Foxy 🦊, and that it wouldn’t make him look bad at all. 

 

This whole thing redeemed Foxy Loxy 🦊 in the eyes of many people looking back on this movie as adults, and are willing to look past any of her past transgressions. Because while she was the designated bully character of this movie, who’s only purpose is to make fun of the main protagonist, and be the baseball star ⚾️ that Chicken Little 🐓 completely outshines when he has his moment, she didn’t deserve this. This is a fate worse than death, a fate that not even other actual Disney villains faced. It made people sympathize and defend her against what the aliens and then Runt did to her. Never before have I seen so many people sympathize more with the bully, the character who we’re supposed to hate, than the three main characters, the characters who we’re supposed to like and root for, but that’s what happens when you have one of your characters do something absolutely morally reprehensible and face no consequences for it and in fact be rewarded for it. 

 

But, like a lot of things people didn’t like about this movie, I wonder if they were going to address this in the sequel, and actually address how messed up this relationship between Runt and Foxy Loxy 🦊 is, how it’s built on a foundation of lies and manipulation, and even have Foxy 🦊 revert back to her old self again. I could see that potentially be a major subplot in the movie to the main plot about the love triangle ❤️ which I’ll get to in a moment, since the whole second movie was going to be about relationship troubles. Which again, I’ll get to in a moment. And also since it seems like the second movie was striving to be an improvement over the first movie and fix all of the things people hated about the first movie, and Foxy Loxy 🦊’s fate is definitely one of them. It’s one of the main things people hated about the movie besides Buck Cluck. That’s something they would’ve definitely needed to rectify if they expected people to like the sequel more than the first movie or at least redeem the first movie in their eyes.

Speaking of which, I just learned this recently, but apparently, there was going to a sequel to this movie, and it got far enough along in the development that they made full-voiced animatics for it, one of which is available online. From what it seems like, they were going to do a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing 🐺🐑, where Chicken Little 🐓 develops feelings for a French sheep girl 🇫🇷🐑♀︎ named Raffaela (voiced in the animatics by none other than Tara Strong, one of the most prolific and famous voice actors), despite the fact that he’s in a relationship with Abby, and at some point, it turns out that Raffaela is actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing 🐺🐑. And that’s like a nod to the original plot of the first movie (back when Chicken Little 🐓 was a girl ♀︎) where Chicken Little 🐓 went to a summer camp and it turned out that all the camp counselors were actually wolves in sheep’s clothing 🐺🐑 plotting to eat the children. I don’t know how true that this, but this something that has been floating around in relation to the plot of the unmade Chicken Little 2 🐓. 

 

But, the plot was going to revolve around this love triangle ❤️ where Chicken Little 🐓 would have to choose between Abby or this new girl ♀︎ Raffaela, and Abby ends up feeling insecure and inadequate compared to Raffaela because everyone else thinks she’s pretty 😍 including Chicken Little 🐓, while everyone still thinks Abby’s ugly. She’s still considered the “ugly duckling.” So, a good chunk of the plot had to deal with her trying to give herself a makeover, trying to change her appearance so that people will actually like her, and there would be this whole message of just being herself, not changing your appearance or who you are just to impress someone. 

 

Kind of the same message as that Loud House episode, “Back in Black” where Lucy develops a crush 😍 on Rusty’s little brother, Rocky and tries to change her appearance and her whole personality to impress him and get him to like her after she mistakenly believes that she scared him off and that he didn’t like that she was a goth. But he did actually like her, he liked her just the way she was, and she changed her appearance for nothing. Based totally on a misunderstanding and lack of communication. A lot of problems in that show are caused by characters not talking to each other, and trying to do these elaborate schemes that end up making the problem worse when simply talking would’ve been the better option. In other words, it’s a show where characters try to outsmart the truth and it usually ending up blowing up in their faces. 

 

I think Raffaela secretly being a wolf in disguise 🐺 would’ve made the plot a bit more interesting. Not that I have a problem with the plot being more of a romance drama ❤️ and being revolved around a love triangle ❤️, but I think Raffaela being a wolf 🐺 would’ve added that extra something special to it to truly bring it over the edge. Like, there has to be more to it than that. Chicken Little 🐓 wasn’t simply making a mistake, embarrassing himself and his dad, and becoming a laughing stock 😆 in the town, and then redeeming himself by becoming a baseball star ⚾️ within the community (keeping his dad’s baseball legacy ⚾️ alive). It was also about that same boy ♂︎ saving the town from an alien invasion 👽, being proven right, validating the very paranoid suspicions that made him a town laughing stock 😆, and becoming a hero as a result. Everyone in the town goes from hating him or laughing at him 😆 to loving him 🤩, bushing that whole other incident aside, or perhaps forgiving it since Chicken Little 🐓 was proven right in the end. He was right all along. 

 

They added sci-fi elements to an otherwise human story (told with anthropomorphic animals), so having Raffaela be a wolf in disguise 🐺 would be a great way to continue that sort of thing. Plus, her secretly being a wolf in disguise 🐺 would enhance the themes that the sequel seemed to be going for. Maybe, they could’ve taken it a step further and not simply had Raffaela being a wolf 🐺 disguised as a sheep 🐑, but actually be a werewolf 🐺. That would be a cool and unique take on the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing 🐺🐑 story. But for whatever reason, it got canceled, and never saw the light of day. I don’t know why. I doubt that it was because of the critical and audience reception because they still decided to make it anyway despite what critics and audiences at the time said about it. Or they already started making it before any of the reviews came in and before any of them knew what general audiences thought of the first movie. 

 

It had to have been for some other reason, some business from the higher-ups at Disney. Perhaps a regime change as Disney transitioned from Michael Eisner to Bob Iger, who took the company in a completely different direction than what is going in under Eisner. Maybe after Eisner left, Iger permanently shelved the project because he had no interest in making a Chicken Little 🐓 sequel, it didn’t fit with his vision for the company going forward. We’re talking to the 2005 to 2007 timeframe, before Disney started buying all these other film companies and IPs like Marvel and Star Wars, when Bob Iger was just starting out as the new CEO of Disney and hadn’t done any of the things that would make him a divisive figure within the industry and within Disney history. 

 

Had this sequel gotten made, I think it might’ve been one of those things where people actually liked it better than the first one and people say that it was an improvement over the first one if it was done right, if the love triangle ❤️ was handled well. It would’ve taken everything that worked about the first one and enhanced them, made them even better. Taking the relationships that were established in the first movie and developing them further from where we left off. Not exactly from where it left off since the characters were going to be a bit older in this sequel than they were in the first one, and in the case of Chicken Little 🐓 and Abby’s relationship, the honeymoon period has long passed and there are troubles brewing in their relationship. That spark that initially brought them together is gone, and now they’re on the verge of breaking up if Chicken Little 🐓 makes the wrong choice, if he chooses Raffaela and continues hurt Abby’s feelings and perpetuate and heighten her insecurities rather than show her empathy and try to understand how she feels and make things better. But, you know what I mean. 

 

And this wasn’t the only Disney animated film project that was canceled around that time, there were a bunch of them like My Peoples, which was going to be an animated film about ghosts 👻, specifically, it was going to be about this boy ♂︎ who created these dolls to impress a girl ♀︎ he has a crush on 😍, but the dolls get dosed with a magic potion 🧪 and end up being possessed by a bunch of ghosts 👻 (including the ghost 👻 of Abraham Lincoln), which is why it has the alternate title, A Few Good Ghosts 👻. There was also this element of two feuding families, like the boy ♂︎ and girl ♀︎ were from these two rival families that were feuding with each other. So, it was going to be a take on the Hatfields and the McCoys and Romeo and Juliet. 

 

It was set to be directed by Barry Cook, the co-director on Mulan (1998), and was going to be a bit of a 2D and 3D animation hybrid. It was even going to star Dolly Parton, there’s an actual fully proof of concept trailer type thing that is fully voice acted and some animation tests that were also fully voice acted where Dolly Parton voices her character, I think it’s the old lady ♂︎, the grandma. Or it might be one of the dolls that’s brought to life by the potion or by the ghosts possessing it, because in that animation test that’s available online, we her interacting with another character who’s animated in 2D while she’s animated in 3D, and she’s way smaller by comparison. Like, she’s tiny, just like a doll, so she was probably voicing one of the possessed dolls. But, it never got made, and it was permanently shelved in favor of Chicken Little 🐓, which is another reason why some people don’t like this movie. 

 

They resent Chicken Little 🐓 for leading to the cancellation of My Peoples and be made instead of it. But, some of the characters and concept did get reused and repurposed in Meet the Robinsons, a Disney animated film that I actually saw in theaters when it came out but wasn’t a huge fan of. I saw Chicken Little 🐓 in theaters too BTW. So, it’s pretty ironic that an animated project at Disney by the co-director of one of the top Disney Renaissance era films was canceled in order to make Chicken Little 🐓, only for Chicken Little 🐓 to have a sequel that was in development that ended up canceled 😆. All of Disney’s attempts at turning Chicken Little 🐓 into a franchise were ultimately unsuccessful. I would say it was karma if I actually believed in karma. But hey, at least we got a video game out of it 😁, even if I never played it or even heard of it until I wrote this review. It’s the closest thing to a sequel that we’re probably ever going to get, so might as well enjoy it.