Chicken Little (2005 film)
Chicken Little is a 2005 American computer-animated science fiction comedy film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and very loosely based on the "Henny Penny" Anglo-Saxon fairy tale. The 46th Disney animated feature film, it was directed by Mark Dindal from a screenplay by Steve Bencich, Ron J. Friedman, and Ron Anderson, based on a story by Mark Kennedy and Dindal. In this version, the title character is ridiculed by his town for causing a panic, thinking that the "sky was falling". A year later he attempts to fix his reputation, followed by an  unexpected truth regarding his past being revealed. The film is dedicated to Disney artist and writer Joe Grant, who died before the film's release. This also marked the final film appearance of Don Knotts during his lifetime, as his next and final film, "Air Buddies" (another Disney-produced film that was released just over a year later), would be released posthumously. "Chicken Little" was animated in-house at Walt Disney Feature Animation's main headquarters in Burbank, California and released by Walt Disney Pictures on November 4, 2005, in Disney Digital 3-D (the first film to be released  in this format) along with the standard 2D version. It is Disney's first fully computer-animated feature film, as Pixar's films were distributed but not produced by Disney, and "Dinosaur" (2000) was a combination of live-action and computer animation which in turn was provided by division The Secret Lab. "Chicken Little" was Disney's second adaptation of the fable after a propaganda cartoon made during World War II. The film is also the last Disney animated film produced under the name Walt Disney Feature Animation before the studio was renamed Walt Disney Animation Studios. "Chicken Little" received  mixed to negative reviews from critics and grossed $314 million worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing animated film of 2005 (behind "Madagascar"). Plot. In the town of Oakey Oaks, Ace Cluck, also known as Chicken Little, rings the school bell and warns everyone to run for their lives. This sends the whole town into a frenzied panic. Eventually, the head of the Fire Department calms down enough to ask him what is going on. Chicken Little exclaims that the sky is falling, because a mysterious piece of the sky shaped like the nearby stop sign had fallen on  his head when he was sitting under the big oak tree in the town square; however, he is unable to find the piece. His father, Buck Cluck, who was once a middle school baseball star, assumes that this "piece of the sky" was just an acorn that has fallen off the tree and has also hit him on the head, making Chicken Little the laughingstock of the town. A year later, Chicken Little has become infamous in the town for being prone to ruin everything accidentally. His only friends are outcasts like himself: Abby "Ugly Duckling" Mallard, an obese and  cowardly pig named Runt of the Litter, and Fish Out of Water, who wears a helmet full of tap water to breathe. Trying to help, Abby encourages Chicken Little to talk to his father, but he only wants to make his dad proud of him. He joins his school's baseball team to recover his reputation and his father's pride but is made last until the ninth inning of the last game. Chicken Little is reluctantly called to bat by the coach. Chicken Little hits the ball on his third swing and makes it past first, second, and third  bases, but is met at home plate by the outfielders. He tries sliding onto the home plate but is touched by the ball. While it is presumed that he lost the game, the umpire brushes away the dust to reveal Chicken Little's foot is barely touching home plate, thus declaring Chicken Little safe and the game won; Chicken Little is hailed as a hero for winning the pennant. Later that night back at home, Chicken Little is hit on the head yet again by the same "piece of the sky" — only to find out that it is not actually  a piece of the sky, but a hexagonal panel that blends into the background, which would thereby explain why he was unable to find it last time. He calls his friends over to help figure out what it is. When Fish pushes a button on the back of the panel, it flies into the sky, taking him with it. It turns out to be part of the camouflage of an invisible UFO piloted by two aliens in metallic armor. After "rescuing" Fish, Chicken Little and his friends are pursued by the aliens throughout a cornfield. Just as they are cornered , Chicken Little manages to ring the bell to warn everyone, but the aliens escape, leaving an orange alien child behind. No one believes the story and Chicken Little's reputation is placed in jeopardy yet again. The next morning, he and his friends discover the alien child, whose name is Kirby, just as a whole fleet of alien spaceships descend on the town and start what appears to be an invasion. However, the invasion is a misunderstanding, as the two aliens are looking for their lost child and attack only out of concern. As the aliens rampage throughout Oakey Oaks , vaporizing everything in their path, Chicken Little realizes he must return Kirby to his parents to save the town. First, though, he must confront his father and regain his trust. In the invasion, Buck, now regaining his pride and trust in his son, defends him from the aliens until they get vaporized. It is then discovered that the aliens were not vaporizing people but teleporting them aboard the UFO. After Chicken Little and his father return Kirby, it turns out the aliens were merely touring Earth and came across the town for its acorns. It is also revealed that the  panel that fell off their ship is malfunctioning. After everything is explained, the apologetic aliens return everything to normal and everyone is grateful for Chicken Little's efforts to save the town. Another year later, Chicken Little, his father, his friends and the citizens of Oakey Oaks watch an in-universe movie depicting an extremely fanciful retelling of the events that transpired, portraying Chicken Little as an action hero also named "Ace". Production. Writing. In September 2001, director Mark Dindal developed the idea for "Chicken Little", with its title character envisioned as an overreacting, doom and gloom female chicken that  went to summer camp to build confidence so she would not 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. 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." However, Dindal later clarified that the decision was made, in part, due to  market research at the time stating, "I remember being told, 'Girls will go see a movie with a boy protagonist but boys won't see a movie with a girl protagonist,'... "That was the wisdom at the time, until "Frozen" comes out and makes $1 billion." In January 2003, when David Stainton became Disney's new president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, he decided the story needed a different approach. He 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. 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 Amazing, too." Casting. 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. Michael J. Fox, Matthew Broderick and David Spade were originally considered for the role. 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." In April 2002, "Variety" reported that Sean Hayes was to voice a character named the Ugly Duckling, but the character was rewritten into a female. 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. 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. 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". 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." Australian comedian Mark Mitchell was hired to re-voice the character of Buck Cluck for the Australian release of the film, as a decision by Disney to get a local personality to publicize the film. Animation. To visualize this story, Disney selected 50 percent of its 2D animation staff to put them in a CGI animation team, and placed them through a rigorous eighteen-month training program with George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, which included an introductory to  Alias's Maya that would serve as the main 3D animation software used on the project. This was due to Disney CEO Michael Eisner announcing that the studio would move to computer animation in response to a downturn caused by rising competition from Pixar and DreamWorks Animation computer animated features, the unsatisfactory box office performances of "The Emperor’s New Groove", "Atlantis: The Lost Empire", "Treasure Planet" (2002), and "Home on the Range" (2004). As some of the animators had worked on "Dinosaur" (2000), which used live-action backgrounds, the animation team took inspiration for its staging, coloring, and theatrical  lighting from Mary Blair's background designs featured in "Alice in Wonderland" (1951) and "Peter Pan" (1953). 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. 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, as well as use real lighting to create cucaloris. 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, by which the characters' fluidity of motion was inspired from the Goofy cartoon "How to Play Baseball" (1942). 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. All of the characters were constructed using geometric polygons. For the title character, there were 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. 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. 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 grooming fur, feathers, and generating leaves. Release. The film was originally scheduled for release on July 1, 2005, but on December 7, 2004, its release date was pushed back to November 4, 2005, the release date  that was originally slated for Disney/Pixar's "Cars". The release date change was also the day before DreamWorks Animation changed the release date of "Shrek the Third", from November 2006 to May 2007. "Cars" was later released on June 9, 2006. At the time of the release of "Chicken Little", the co-production deal between Disney and Pixar was set to expire with the release of "Cars" in 2006. The result of the contentious negotiations between Disney and Pixar was viewed to depend heavily on how "Chicken Little" performed at the box office. If successful, the film would have  given Disney leverage in its negotiations for a new contract to distribute Pixar's films. A failure would have allowed Pixar to argue that Disney could not produce CGI films. On October 30, 2005, the film premiered at the El Capitan Theatre, with the cast and filmmakers as attendees, which was followed with a ballroom bash at the Hollywood and Highland Center. Along with its standard theatrical release, the film was the first Disney in-house release to be rendered in Disney Digital 3D, that was produced by Industrial Light & Magic, and exhibited via Dolby Digital Cinema servers at approximately  100 selected theaters in twenty five top markets. To describe the process, Dindal remembers that it was a last minute decision, as it was suggested just 11 months before its release. For the 3D conversion, Dindal had a specific way he wanted the film to look: he wanted it to feel like a moving View-Master. As he puts it, Marketing. The first trailer was released online in early 2004. It was also attached to the DVD release of "Brother Bear". Accompanied with the theatrical release, Disney Consumer Products released a series of plush items, toys, activity sets, keepsakes, and  apparel. Home media. "Chicken Little" was first released on DVD on March 21, 2006, in a single disc edition. The DVD contained the film accompanied with deleted scenes, three alternate openings, a 6 part making-of featurette, an interactive game, a karaoke sing along, two music videos, and animation test footage of the female Chicken Little. 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. 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. A VHS version was also released, but only as a Disney Movie Club exclusive, presented in a rare fullscreen aspect ratio. Reception. Box office. 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. 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". The film grossed $135.4 million in North America, and $179 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $314.4 million. 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), "" (2001), "Treasure Planet" (2002), and "Home on the Range" (2004). Critical response. Rotten Tomatoes, reports that of surveyed critics gave positive reviews; the average score is . The critical consensus states: "Disney expends more effort in the technical presentation than  in crafting an original storyline." Metacritic, gave the film an average score of 48 based on 32 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A-" on an A+ to F scale. James Berardinelli, writing his review for "ReelViews", gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four stating 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. 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." 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." 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." "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." 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". Olly Richards of "Empire Magazine" gave the film a three out of five stars, saying, "Beyond a cheeky, twisty bit of genre -tinkering, theres more here for the under-tens than over-, but it's still charming, amusing and energetic enough to win you over." Angel Cohn of "TV Guide" gave the film three 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." 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." "Plugged In" wrote, "A postscript for parents: A single “mistake” defines Chicken Little, and he spends “the rest of his life” trying to live it down. As he puts it, “One moment destroyed my life.” Later, another single moment—his home run—redefines him as a hero to his friends and his dad, who says, “I guess that puts the whole ‘sky is falling’ incident behind us once and for all.” Insecure (and observant) young viewers may latch on to this kind of oversimplification and  use it as license to magnify the significance of their own bumblings, whatever they might be." Common Sense Media gave the film a three out of five stars, writing, "Cute, sometimes-frantic movie has peril, potential scares." Dindal would express regret over the final version of the film: Accolades. 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 "". At the 2006 Kids' Choice Awards it got nominated for Favorite Animated Movie, but lost to "Madagascar". At the 2005 Stinkers Bad  Movie Awards it won: Worst Animated Film. Soundtrack. The soundtrack album contains an original score composed and produced by John Debney, who had previously worked with Dindal on "The Emperor's New Groove" (2000), with music by a wide range of artists, some musical veterans, such as Patti LaBelle and Diana Ross, as well as others. Uniquely for a Disney animated film, several of the songs are covers of classic popular songs, such as Elton John's "Don't Go Breaking My Heart," Carole King's "It's Too Late," and the Spice Girls' signature hit "Wannabe." However, the film  does include one original song, "One Little Slip" by Barenaked Ladies. The soundtrack was released on November 1, 2005, by Walt Disney Records. Video games. "Chicken Little" spawned two video games. The first, "Chicken Little", is an action-adventure video game released for Xbox on October 18, 2005, by Buena Vista Games. Two days later it was released for PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube and Game Boy Advance (October 20, 2005), and later Microsoft Windows (November 2, 2005). "Chicken Little" for Game Boy Advance was developed by A2M, while BVG's recently acquired development studio, Avalanche Software, developed the game  for the consoles. The second video game, "", is a multi-platform video game, for the Wii, Nintendo DS, Microsoft Windows, and PlayStation 2 inspired by the "superhero movie within the movie" finale of the film. It features Ace, the superhero alter ego of Chicken Little, and the Hollywood versions of his misfit band of friends: Runt, Abby, and Fish-Out-of-Water. Chicken Little himself appears as a summon in the video game "Kingdom Hearts II". His inclusion is somewhat noteworthy as "Kingdom Hearts II" debuted before the film in Japan, with the character's inclusion serving as a promotion  for the then-upcoming movie. Cancelled sequel. Disneytoon Studios originally planned to make a direct-to-video sequel to" Chicken Little", tentatively titled "Chicken Little 2: The Ugly Duckling Story". Directed by Klay Hall, the story would involve Chicken Little in the middle of a love triangle between his childhood sweetheart, Abby Mallard, and a beautiful newcomer, Raffaela, a French sheep. Being at a great disadvantage, Abby would go to great lengths to give herself a makeover. According to Tod Carter, a story artist on the film, early screenings of the story reel were very well received, prompting Disney to  think about increasing the budget to match the production quality with the quality of the story. Soon after 2006, when John Lasseter became Walt Disney Animation Studios' new chief creative officer, he called for all sequels and future sequels that Disneytoon had planned to be cancelled. According to Carter, this was a reaction to the sales figures for current projects and the overall market, adding: "The executives didn't feel that the original film had a wide enough market to draw upon to support the sequel."