Those who doubted that Disney could possibly survive without Pixar's skill in computer animation have seen this non-Pixar release flourish at the American box office. No one, however, could seriously claim that the comic caper has anything approaching the adventurous Pixar style.
What it has, however, is pace and a suitable sense of fun as Chicken Little persuades the animal inhabitants of Oaky Oaks that the sky is falling in and gets laughed out of his paranoid senses when it doesn't. But he gets the last giggle when space invaders appear, looking for the strange child they carelessly dropped from the heavens.
The film's characters are rather like the fluffy or rubbery toys you give six- to eight-year-olds at Christmas when you can't think of anything else. Not totally endearing. But they are wellvoiced by Zach Braff, Joan Cusack, Steve Zahn and Garry Marshall. And Disney does give them definable characters in between the out-and-out slapstick.
The only real disappointments are the rather dull space invaders. But if the finale isn't as good as the flailing opening, the short running time means that nobody is likely to get bored.
Chicken Little
Cert: U
