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Monday, July 20, 2009

BD impressions: Chicken Little

12:13 PM / BD Impressions / 1 Comment

Chicken Little came about at a time when the Disney studio was convinced that the path to success lay in imitating its arch-rival DreamWorks, which for some bizarre reason raked in a massive amount of cash with Shrek and its sequel. As a result this, Disney's first in-house CG feature, feels irritatingly smug and constantly undercuts itself by never taking itself seriously, even when the material calls for it to do so. The result is that even an "end of the world" scenario is treated as nothing more than an extended joke and an excuse for a string of pop culture references, with the cloyingly cutesy characters serving as mouthpieces for whatever the writers happen to think is funny, regardless of whether it fits contextually. In doing so, the whole exercise feels incredibly insignificant, an 80-minute vacuum that doesn't outstay its welcome but leaves you wondering what the point of it was. Director Mark Dindal previously helmed The Emperor's New Groove, which suffered from precisely the same flaws, so in a sense we probably shouldn't be entirely surprised. However, I think some people assumed that, because many of Disney's recent 2D movies had been so lacklustre, a move to 3D would instantly turn the studio's fortunes around.

Oh, and whoever thought Zach Braff could convincingly voice a cartoon chicken boy needs their head examined. That said, the two biggest laughs in the film come from his delivery of certain lines.

This was one of Disney's first BD titles, and it looks very good indeed, in spite of a few compression problems creeping in during some of the more frenetic moments; here's the worst instance I noticed. (Although presented on a BD-50, the data barely extends over the layer break. That said, the film is only 80 minutes long.) The image has not, as far as I can tell, been manipulated in any way, and on the whole it's on par with what you would expect of a direct digital-to-digital transfer of a CGI movie. 9.5/10

By the way, I was quite disappointed with the audio mix on this title. It seemed incredibly constrained, as if the high and low frequencies had all been crushed together into the mid-range.

Chicken Little
studio: Buena Vista; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 19 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 33.62 Mbit/sec

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