Chicken Little—tiny bit of a spoiler

Just took my boys to see Chicken Little, and despite being scandalized over spending $30 for tickets for the four of us, a medium popcorn and an ICEE, I really enjoyed the movie. Disney never fails to impress me. The story lines, I think, are always great, the animation is brilliant, the comedy is balanced for both adults and children, and the songs are fun and upbeat. This movie only had a few original songs that I noticed, but they were good. Instead they decided to use old favorites like I Will Survive, We Are The Champions, and Stayin’ Alive, which I thought worked well to bring in the older audience members. Relatively speaking.

I think this movie had great character development—all those barn animals were really three-dimensional. Plus, there was feel-good ending—even the alien invasion wasn’t as threatening as it appeared—and the clencher, a smidge of romance! How delightful…despite it’s being between a duck and a chicken. The point is, he could see past her limp, disheveled feathers and droopy eyes, and she could see past his accident-prone teensiness, and they made it work! At least until one of them molts and meets someone new…

All in all, I have to say, I’m rarely (if ever) disappointed in a Disney flick. Sure it’s a little much to pay for an hour and twenty minutes of cartoon antics, but if you pay attention, there’s enjoyment enough to be found in the often subtle humor hidden amid the much-used slap-stick, which I think, is actually funny in cartoons.

On a side note...whatever happened to those movies Disney used to make with the real-life actors paired with animation, like Pete’s Dragon, Mary Poppins, Chitty-Chitty, Bang-Bang? I thought those were very clever, and I would imagine they’d be considerably easy to engineer these days… I have to admit, I kinda miss them. Mary Poppins is a big favorite of mine.