Chicken Little, Disney's first computer-generated solo effort, has not lifted it up the animation pecking order - just as well the company has snapped up Pixar, writes Hilary Fannin
Last November, as cars and buildings blazed in Parisian suburbs and a disaffected, largely black population took to the streets to protest, a very different kind of revolution was happening in the spectacularly kitsch theme park, Disneyland Paris, a stone's throw from the deepening unrest. Amid the spinning teacups and fairy-lit castle, the over-priced coffee and the vertiginous space rides, a lone chicken, charged with keeping the Disney empire afloat, peeked over the rim of his lime-green spectacles, took a deep breath and prepared to meet his public.
Chicken Little had arrived in Europe. This is the first time Disney has produced a fully computer-animated feature film entirely on its own - and now it's more than likely the last time, given the company's acquisition last week of the fabulous Pixar.
At the time, there was a lot riding on the little bird's shoulders. The once magical Disney, which brought the world the first "fully synchronised" sound cartoon when it introduced Mickey Mouse in November 1928 and whose artists had created, by hand, all the fantastical characters that populated our childhood, was failing to meet the demands of a new generation. Pixar, the driving force behind the computer-generated (CG) animation revolution, had grabbed Disney's audience by their dusty lapels and hurled them into a breathtakingly well- executed world of high-tech animation features. And although one might have missed the gentle nostalgic charm of Cinderella's operatic bluebirds or Snow White's harmonious septuplets, Pixar's stable of successes - including Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles - were a loud and joyous testament to the excitement, freshness and sheer power of this new medium.
Former Disney boss Michael Eisner and Pixar chief executive Steve Jobs (who is also head of Apple computers), while maintaining a business relationship, were like a couple in the throes of an ostensibly amicable but uneasy divorce. Coinciding with the release of Chicken Little, the business relationship between the two companies - whereby Disney, beginning in 1995 with Toy Story, had sole distribution of Pixar films - was coming to an end. Pixar's forthcoming Cars, due out this summer, would have seen the final chapter of that particular arrangement.
But the two companies were inextricably linked. John Lasseter, who directed the groundbreaking Toy Story and who is described as the guiding force and inspiration behind Pixar, formerly worked in Disney as an animator and cites as his mentors the Disney artists who trained him.
Disney, taking the only path it could, plunged into the CG world alone, albeit with some informal technical support from Pixar, whose animators, apparently, were at the end of a telephone for advice if their Disney counterparts hit a particularly knotty problem. As Randy Fullmer, the producer of Chicken Little, put it: "Pixar had been at it for 15 years; Disney was laying the pipes." And so Disney staked its future on a chicken, a chicken who, ironically enough, wakes up one morning to find the sky is falling in. ("Like hello!" as Chicken Little's sidekick and duckling love interest, Abby Mallard, would say, "is this something you need to talk about?")
Chicken Little, written and directed by Mark Dindal and produced by Fullmer (the team behind the less than exhilarating Emperor's New Groove, was hewn from the old English fable and morality tale, Chicken Licken, about a chicken who more or less cried wolf - only this time the whimsical little fillet isn't joking.
There was a distinctly tense and chalkily dry feeling as the assembled press and each with one of their chosen offspring queued outside the Cinamatique to view Disney's first fully CG animated feature (a fact the usherettes practically had tattooed on their foreheads lest we forget).
It is mildly surreal to be surrounded by life-sized poultry cutouts when a little beyond the well-manicured perimeter of Disneyland Paris a city is struggling to curtail potentially explosive race riots. If the French needed a dampener, however, they really should have come to the movie.
DISNEY HAD A monumental task on its hands when it decided to bite the CG bullet, re-training more than half of its animators to drop the pencil and pick up the mouse, developing digital sketches for the recidivist "hand-drawers" and finding new ways to incorporate its visually emblematic "squash and stretch" technique which gives cartoon characters their distinctly Disneyesque life and movement. And these are certainly the most successful aspects of the film, thanks in part to two Irishmen, veteran animator Eamonn Butler, who was responsible for the re-education programme, and the young and talented Jason Ryan, whose highly successful animation career plucked him from Cabinteely and landed him in California. Ryan, as supervising animator for the character of Chicken Little, speaks passionately about the limitless potential of CG once a hand-drawn quality is achieved in the work.
Chicken Little was not unsuccessful on the first weekend of its US release; however, compared to Pixar's two most recent hits, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles), it was around $30 million less profitable.
The critical response has, however, been lukewarm, if not a little poultry. The problem seems to lie in the plot: five and a half years in development, it feels over-worked and over-frenetic, a casserole of alien invasions, filial loyalty and free-range adolescent chick angst set in the homely 1950s-style town of Oakey Oaks.
The diktat from the Disney executives, apparently, was to make the story funnier and to broaden its box-office appeal, a demand possibly indicative of a lack of confidence and ultimately responsible, surely, for the film's lack of cohesion.
One of Michael Eisner's last executive acts prior to leaving Disney was to give Chicken Little a sex change - since the film's conception it had been voiced by a female actor, but Eisner's decision was final and Zach Braff (of TV series Scrubs) was brought on board to re-voice the re-gendered bird.
UNDERPINNING THE ENTIRE project, including the love-bomb press launch, was a sense of an attempted corporate revamp; grinning through its painfully fresh facelift, Disney was admitting that it had, in the recent past, lost its way. "We lost our core family audience," Dindal and Fullmer agreed. Their aim with Chicken Little was to bring "Walt Disney's legacy of telling great stories with great characters to new heights".
Given the possibility of a bird flu pandemic, I asked them if they regretted pinning their hopes on a chicken. They smiled, revealing their Hollywood dentistry, and shook their heads. It wasn't the first or last time they'll be asked.
No matter how broad an appeal Disney aims for with its new release, Chicken Little is a children's film - and children will soon let you know if Project Chicken has succeeded. My own son, Peter, who is nine, accompanied me to Disneyland, where we first headed for a stomach-churning blast in the theme park. Revelling in the magic words "room service" and a bathroom full of Mickey Mouse paraphernalia, Peter was well- disposed to enjoy any film (he would have sat through Brief Encounter if it meant he could torture me on the Indiana mining train again), but Chicken Little didn't ring his bell. The generous originality of The Incredibles and the poignancy and humour of Toy Story have raised children's expectations, and at no point during Chicken Little was Peter swept up into its world. One American blogger said of the film that "there is nothing here that isn't available on Saturday morning TV".
The artwork notwithstanding, Chicken Little is a brave but ultimately unmemorable attempt by a little bird to hold up a stormy sky.
With Disney's €6 billion acquisition of Pixar last week, however, and John Lasseter taking control of Disney's animation division, the weather is bound to improve. As Lasseter says, "focus on the story"; CG or hand-drawn, it's the story that matters. After all, you can't programme imagination - yet.
Chicken Little opens next Friday