Disney Review: Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

I already miss cel animation.

Read the previous entry in this series here.

UPDATE: You can read the next entry in this series here.

46. *Chicken Little (2005)

Chicken Little was Disney's first completely 3D computer-rendered animated feature, and surrounding its release, Disney announced that they were transitioning all its traditional cel animated workshops into computer rendering facilities; they'd experimented with this technology in movies like Dinosaur and Fantasia 2000 and Treasure Planet, but this is the first time that everything on the screen was built by computer. And... okay, look, I'm not anti-technology or anti-CGI or some kind of Luddite. But let me show you something. Click on this link here. What you're looking at is Treasure Planet, a movie that, you might remember, I'm not super fond of, but let's not bother with the movie as a whole right now; just look at this one image—one where the majority of what you see is traditional 2D cel animation (and indeed, a good portion of the rest of the movie is this style, too, or at least foregrounds it). Look at those characters, drawn with just the immaculate detail needed to convey that they are emotive beings; you can see it on their faces, their body language, how the entirety of each of their designs is built to be expressive and alive. Look at the colors, too, the nuanced palette of earthy browns and metallic grays and blacks offset by the spectral blue of the cosmos. Now click on this link. This is a similar moment captured in Chicken Little, an emotional interaction between a young boy and a father figure as they ride a vehicle—it is, of course, germane to this discussion, rendered in 3D computer animation. Look at the characters: they're stiff, lacking in detail, and their emotional expressions are stilted and vague, as if they are people in rigid, plastic suits trying to emote. Look at the colors: muddy and dull (the father, the seats) when they aren't garish (the son's glasses). My point is: WHY WOULD YOU TRADE THAT LOVELY 2D CEL ANIMATION FOR THIS HIDEOUS TRASH??!? Treasure Planet isn't even an exemplary example of 2D cel animation; I could have linked to a screenshot of Lilo & Stitch or Brother Bear or (if I really wanted to be mean) Pinocchio or Bambi and had even starker results. But I think Treasure Planet proves my point nicely, that even in the weaker Disney outings the cel animation is often a saving grace of characterization and visual flair. And then they blew it all up. Like, why, Disney? Why? (and p.s. I know the answer is "money," because money is always the answer; but let me have my moment of aesthetic angst)

It would be one thing if Disney had some amazing computer technology at this point by which it could render stunning imagery impossible in cel animation. CG animation was still young, but Pixar had proven that some lovely work could be done—for reference, The Incredibles was released the year prior to Chicken Little, and Finding Nemo two years prior. But no, Chicken Little's animation technology is barely up to even its 2005 DreamWorks counterpart (Madagascar, for the morbidly curious). It looks terrible, like everything is hollow and dead inside, polystyrene models on a PlaySkool set in an empty room, and I just have to throw my hands at the sky and scream, They dismantled their cel animation program for this?!

It would be another thing if this was a movie with a brilliant screenplay and voice acting caged in by its technological limitations. But Chicken Little ain't that. It's barely even competent as a narrative, more a pileup of pop culture references and jarring genre switcheroos than a coherent story. Oh, nominally it's about something to do with Chicken Little thinking the sky is falling and nobody believes him and this estranges him from his father but then he plays baseball, and it's great, but then the sky is falling again and his dad is all embarrassed again but then it turns out it's space aliens and then they have to get the baby space alien to the parents and I guess Chicken Little and his dad are cool in the end. But there is nothing about this that has a coherent structure or theme, and you get the sense that the plot is more an excuse to string the movie along from one pop-culture gag to the next. One awful pop-culture gag to the next, I should say. Things like playing "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" as the aliens are blowing up the town; things like having the characters sing "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls for no particular reason except to laugh that these characters are singing a Spice Girls song. Ya know, sophisticated humor. It's also a remarkably mean movie, constantly using the characters' appearance and body type as the butt of a joke—for example, doing a musical sting on the first shot of the "Ugly Duckling" character as the rest of the characters laugh at her appearance and her teacher recoils in horror at her unconventional looks. It's hateful, and the movie never walks it back because, again, there's nothing coherent enough about its narrative to actually develop characters or create consistent themes.

The movie is clearly Disney attempting a return volley after DreamWorks planted its flag in the CGI market with the blaze of referential humor and irreverent nose-thumbing at sincere narrative convention of Shrek and its sequel. But in trying so hard to disprove DreamWork's dismissal of Disney as square and old-fashioned, Chicken Little instead cements the argument, showing the Walt Disney Animated Studios of 2005 to be an uninspiring and pathetic relic chasing at the coattails of a younger, sleeker studio's success. Chicken Little is a trendy, ugly piece of pandering garbage that fails to deliver on either the grand promise of the Walt Disney label (like, good animation, come on) or even the meager hope of its own premise (this is the same director whose name ended up on the final product of The Emperor's New Groove, and you can see it straining for that same goofy irreverence), and I hated it. Disney would eventually make good computer-animated movies, but good lord, this one just isn't it.

47. *Meet the Robinsons (2007)

In most contexts, Meet the Robinsons wouldn't be anything special. A wacky CGI animated film with a breakneck pace, a clever but ultimately heartfelt screenplay, and a silly-to-the-point-of-absurd sense of humor—this is basically where DreamWorks was ultimately headed once they got all the Shreks out of its system, and it's where Despicable Me's Illumination began, which is to say that Meet the Robinsons is every generic, mildly pleasant CG-animated kids movie of the 2010s. It's fine. Not great, barely even good, but not bad. Just fine.

But after the putrid turd of Chicken Little, anything would look good, and so Meet the Robinsons has the luck of being positioned so that "just fine" actually feels like a quantum leap forward. I mean, if nothing else, look at the animation. It's not that Meet the Robinsons exactly looks good—the characters have that dead-eyed gaze that plagues most CGI human characters of the 2000s, and the environments still look like plastic sets (albeit bigger and busier ones than in Chicken Little) in an empty room. Meet the Robinsons is no aesthetic landmark. But good heavens, is it a balm for the eyes after the assault of Chicken Little. Blessedly, it looks less jaggedly polygon-ish than its immediate predecessor, going for the round, doughy look that most CGI animation would trend toward in the 2010s as animators realized how freaky realistic textures look on CG creations, and the characters, though hardly iconic, at least have some life and emotional range to them. Which is, again, 2010s CGI kids movie 101. But still better than Chicken Little! The same goes for the story, the execution of which is nothing special at all but at least functions as a coherent narrative with clear emotional beats. I admire how casually weird the movie gets with some of its secondary details (the whirlwind tour of the future Robinson home at the start of the movie's second act is a wonderful bit of dadaist sci-fi), but Chicken Little is weird, too—Meet the Robinsons just manages to create a real story out of its grab bag of one-off oddities.

I'm loath to mention it because of the tricky territory I'll quickly run aground of if I stay on the subject too long, but it's crucial enough to Disney's future that I think it bears discussion: in 2006, a year prior to the release of Meet the Robinsons, Disney bought Pixar, and consequently, John Lasseter, Pixar's leader of sorts, became Disney animation's creative director. And yes, I know that John Lasseter was a grossly inappropriate and sexually coercive superior, and I'm neither excusing that nor suggesting that it was the wrong decision to have him relieved of his role in the company earlier this year (it was absolutely the right decision, given his behavior). But the impact that Pixar in general and Lasseter specifically had on Disney's creative output is undeniable and major, and Meet the Robinsons is the first Disney film to benefit from that. There are the small touches—this is the first appearance of the current Disney castle intro, as well as the whistling Steamboat Willie animation to introduce the Walt Disney Animated Studios logo; it's also the first Disney film since The Rescuers Down Under to have been screened with an animated short before the feature ("Working for Peanuts" if you saw the movie in 3D, "Boat Builders" if in 2D). All of this was a careful bid to evoke both the recent successes of the Pixar output and also the classic legacy of Walt Disney Animated Studios in general, as if to say, "Hey, we know we've been kind of going astray lately, but don't worry, we'll be as good as ever soon." Then there are the specifics of this movie, like the retreat from the then-trendy pop-culture snark humor of mainstream American animation toward more openly sentimental, even melancholy emotional territory—a clear Lasseter (or at least a Pixar) signature. And then there was the fact that to the press, Lasseter was saying he was going to bring back the 2D cel animation, alternating between CGI and traditional cel releases. These were all very good signs for us Disney lovers/Chicken Little haters, signaling brighter days at the Mouse House. And if Meet the Robinsons isn't exactly the new bright day, it's at least a decent symbol of the growing light at the dawn horizon.

48. Bolt (2008)

I'm not going to stress the Lasseter connection more than is necessary (there are hundreds of artists contributing to these movies after all), but there is something about Bolt that does feel particularly Pixar-ian and even specifically Lasseterian, which makes sense, given that it's the first movie made entirely after the Pixar acquisition. You've got the gently absurd, parodic-but-character-focused humor (the pigeon mob, the hamster, etc.), the unobtrusive Americana (it's a road-trip movie that explores themes in its setting not unlike those of the original Cars), the use of a high-concept premise to explore sincere emotional territory (the cat—Mittens—has one monologue about the abandonment of her former owners that feels so much like Jessie's in Toy Story 2 that I started humming "When She Loved Me" to myself involuntarily). We're as much in the Land of Luxo Jr. as the House of Mouse. Which is just a long and sort of backhanded way of saying that Bolt is the most purely pleasurable and effortless a Disney movie has felt in quite some time, and a lot of that feels like a reconfiguring of the studios's values under new leadership. In theory, it's a little bit of a bummer to see the risk-taking spirit and go-for-broke weirdness of 2000s Disney finally settling into the rhythms of what Disney is currently doing today (rhythms that are risk-taking in some respects, but always grounded in a certain brand of aesthetic and genre conservatism), but it's not that much of a bummer, given that those 2000s impulses resulted in one of the most troubled and meager stretch of movies in the studio's history.

And you know, Pixar clone or not, Bolt really is good. It's a fun, energetic movie that improves on the good of Meet the Robinsons (read: warm characterizations, coherent stakes) while tamping down its biggest flaws (the dead-eyed animation—Bolt is a major step forward here—and the incessantly busy storytelling). Its animals are cute without being saccharine; its plot is consistently surprising without ever really stepping out into pointless wtf-ery. And miracle of miracles, I actually like the comic-relief sidekick. Seriously, Rhino the hamster is a complete delight, both on the page (his relentless enthusiasm mixed with his TV-fueled naivety is just delightful) and as a character animated on the screen (he's a little rubbery butterball, and it's adorable, to say nothing of the mesmerizing movement of his hamster ball around the film's environments). I don't know what's happening to me here. Maybe I'm going soft. But Rhino is kind of great.

A lot of people call this the beginning of the Disney Revival (or the Disney Neo-Renaissance or whatever we're supposed to call it), and I'm not sure about that. It still feels like a transitional movie, and as far as the arc toward Renaissance goes, I'd say we're more at The Great Mouse Detective than The Little Mermaid. For one, Bolt's premise, a weird mash-up of The Truman Show with Buzz Lightyear's arc from the first Toy Story, never quite coheres, an issue that intensifies by the film's insistence of making every setpiece a different movie genre, from a straightforward meathead action movie to a heist film to a literal fire-and-rescue at the end. As I said earlier, the character beats are solid, and the plot does have some cool ideas, but it's probably reaching for just one or two too many layers at times, and the result feels a bit more slack than it should—something also contributed to by its 96-minute runtime, practically an eternity for Disney movies (which usually run at or under 80). For another, there's the nagging, ineffable problem of how (with the exception of some Rhino stuff) all the material in Bolt is "good" without ever being "great"; it's a stubbornly just-above-adequate movie made very competently but with little that truly stands out. I know I sound like an ungrateful loser complaining about how this movie is "merely" good when I've just got done with a whole host of definitely not good Disney movies, but I think you all know what I mean—sometimes safe competence can feel like a letdown even as it's entertaining.

Anyway, I'll stop complaining. The Great Mouse Detective is pretty good, and Bolt is better (pretty better?). And there's even better to come.

See y'all next time where hopefully I'll have more substantive things to say about the movies besides the extent to which they resemble Pixar films.