Well, it’d be nice if Warner Archive put out a widescreen Blu-ray...
Chicken Little
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Re: Chicken Little
I decided to give Chicken Little another try last night, after hating it when I first saw it in the theatre. My poor son joined me to see it for his first time (he was born 2 years after the film's 2005 release).
Whoa boy. It may actually be worse than I remembered. That primitive CGI animation has not aged well, I still don't like some of the character designs, the plot is all over the place, random pop songs intrude.... Overall, just a bleh film, though it does have some good moments. But my son agreed--- it was not good.
No wonder DreamWorks Animation was so welcome at the time. (Madagascar and Aardman's Were Rabbit came out that same year.)
Whoa boy. It may actually be worse than I remembered. That primitive CGI animation has not aged well, I still don't like some of the character designs, the plot is all over the place, random pop songs intrude.... Overall, just a bleh film, though it does have some good moments. But my son agreed--- it was not good.
No wonder DreamWorks Animation was so welcome at the time. (Madagascar and Aardman's Were Rabbit came out that same year.)
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Re: Chicken Little
Yes, there are some films you find yourself thinking "No...It CANNOT have been that bad, given what they had to work with. Maybe I wasn't understanding it. Maybe I was just in a bad mood."
So you show it to someone else, and...yeah, it was bad. I've had that experience with other movies.
(I mean, other people seemed to like Beetlejuice, Austin Powers and the first Shrek so much, I was actually questioning my own beliefs.
)
I remember when it came out, Jim Hill--who believed the TAG Guild Blog rumors like the Mike Lindell of Disney--so wanted to demonize Disney's upcoming John Lasster/Pixar deal, he spent the entire month-or-less of the film's release trying to raise the banner of "It wasn't a flop! Eisner doesn't need to spend all that money! WDFA can STILL be a rival to Pixar!...C'mon, it wasn't that bad!"
So you show it to someone else, and...yeah, it was bad. I've had that experience with other movies.
(I mean, other people seemed to like Beetlejuice, Austin Powers and the first Shrek so much, I was actually questioning my own beliefs.
)There is no burning insult like a desperate imitation. Any reason you may have ever had to hate DWA was copied, warped, and magnified into grotesque mutated proportions by Disney, during Eisner's belief that they should surrender the studio's head to Shrek 2 in shame.
I remember when it came out, Jim Hill--who believed the TAG Guild Blog rumors like the Mike Lindell of Disney--so wanted to demonize Disney's upcoming John Lasster/Pixar deal, he spent the entire month-or-less of the film's release trying to raise the banner of "It wasn't a flop! Eisner doesn't need to spend all that money! WDFA can STILL be a rival to Pixar!...C'mon, it wasn't that bad!"
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Re: Chicken Little
The mirror *really* warps when you go back and see Valiant again. No, it doesn’t have the whizz-bang visuals of today, or that could probably match Chick Lit back in the day, but t does what it does within its limitations very well. I think I wrote in one of my reviews that, when it came to Disney's animated feathered features from the same year, who would have thought the independent "cheap" CG import would come off best against the big studio product. What Chick Lit has in loud brashness, Valiant has in underdog pluckiness, and where it lacks in budget it has real heart.