Well, we finally got back to some good stuff. Let's get to it:
Chicken Little - It's easy to see why people dislike this movie. The hip, current twist on an old fairy tale idea was well worn out by the time it came out in 2005. Turning a tale about a silly little chicken into a movie about space aliens sounds ridiculous, but watching it again, I feel like Disney was in on the joke. It's so referential it turns into a meta commentary on self-referential movies, just look at the movie within a movie at the end. Also, a lot of the jokes are quite funny. My favorite side character in the movie is easily Fish out of Water. The animators do a fantastic job with his physical comedy. At it's heart though, Chicken Little is about forgiveness. It's about a boy (or chicken) trying to undo the damage of his one big mistake and earn back his dad's trust. Chicken Little spends most of this movie trying to prove to the world that he's not just the summation of one mistake, and that he's much more than that. Gary Marshall does a nice job of playing the single father who isn't quite sure how to deal with the fallout from his son's actions. Under all the flash and silliness, there is a nice emotional core to this movie that I think people can relate to.
7/10
Fox and the Hound - I'm not quite sure what to make of this movie. The story is fairly well put together and there are some great moments to be sure, but the message of the movie is a little unclear, and the movie is a bit dated. I could never quite figure out who Copper, the hound dog, and Todd, the fox, were supposed to represent. Is this a movie about race relations? If so, it's troubling that they spend so much time dwelling on the fact that Copper and Todd should be natural enemies. Or is the movie more about overcoming society's influence on defining the roles we must take on? I think that's a little better, after all, Copper isn't Todd's enemy until he is trained to be so. By the end of the movie though, Copper is able to overcome his conditioning and he defends Todd as his friend, regardless of the consequences. I guess I was thrown off by the rather stereotypical performance of Pearl Bailey as Big Mama. It struck me as pretty racist and I don't think that was the intention but it did affect my view of the movie. The highlight of the movie for me was young Copper's attempt at howling. It's one of the more adorable things I've ever seen. The biggest problem with this movie though, is the music. Oh man, is it sappy and dated and terrible. The whole spoken word poem/song as Todd is being taken to a game preserve is unbearable. The animation is good, but it lacks a proper Disney shine. The colors are muddy and the attention to detail is just not there. Overall, I'd say I liked this movie more than I thought I would, its a bright spot in Disney's dull years, but it doesn't quite hit Disney quality.
5.5/10
Fun and Fancy Free - This is another compilation movie from the post WWII years as the Disney studios were still getting back to their prewar output. It contains the stories of Bongo and Mickey and the Beanstalk and Jiminy Cricket is our guide into these tales. Bongo is a pretty cute story of a circus bear learning to cope with his new found freedom. His bewilderment as he learns how to live with the wild bears makes for a cute little story, and Dina Shore lends her voice as the narrator much in the same way Bing Crosby did for the Legend of Sleepy Hallow. Mickey and the Beanstalk holds a very dear place in my heart, as it was a favorite of my friends and I when we were kids. We marched around the woods singing the Giant's silly "fee fi fo fum" song while building forts in the woods. However, I quickly realized that I grew watching a truncated version of the story. The theatrical version of the tale includes a rather large amount of live action characters as well. The set up for the tale is an older gentleman and his puppets telling a little girl some stories. These puppets provide their own witty asides throughout the tale. While the jokes are cute, I have to say, the puppets are fairly unsettling when looked at today. They could be the reason some children develop a phobia of ventriloquist dummies. Apart from that; Mickey, Goofy, and Donald get to have a lot of fun playing the poor farmers who sell their cow for some magic beans. If you can get over your fear of dummies, you'll enjoy this lighthearted film. The only thing I didn't like about this movie where the slow, ballads sung in each piece. They went on too long and brought the momentum of the film to a grinding halt. cutting the songs in half would have fixed this, but I suppose attention spans were longer in the 1940s.
6.5/10
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