Netflix Pick: Chicken Little

In 2005, then Pixar chairman Steve Jobs and Disney CEO Robert Iger were in the middle of negotiating over the extension of the deal in which Disney marketed and distributed Pixar’s films, an already impressive roster including Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and most recently 2004’s The Incredibles. The talks hinged on the release of Disney’s first CG animated film produced in-house: Chicken Little, a loose adaptation of the sky-is-falling children’s tale. If the film was successful, Disney could argue that they didn’t have to depend on Pixar for 3D content, giving them the upper hand in the negotiations.

Chicken Little made $40 million in its opening weekend, tying The Lion King for Disney Animation’s biggest opener. While it didn’t fare as well with critics, it struck some kind of chord with thirteen-year-old me and my brothers: we watched our DVD copy over and over again and quoted it endlessly. When I saw it pop up on Netflix, I had to check it out to see if it held up.

For the past five or so years, we’ve all gotten used to Disney Animation cranking out beautiful, well-made CG features. They’ve done this in large part by embracing the narrative and artistic sensibilities of Disney’s hand-drawn classics. Although they don’t adhere strictly to their source material, mega-hits like Tangled and Frozen are essentially earnest musical retellings of fairytales (Rapunzel and The Snow Queen, respectively).

Disney didn’t arrive at this strategy overnight. At the outset, they tried to replicate the success of the less traditional offerings from Dreamworks and Pixar. From its opening frames, Chicken Little makes a concerted effort to distance itself from Disney’s old fairytale tropes, mocking both the classic storybook opening introduction and the beginning of Lion King.

From there we’re thrown straight into the inciting incident, in which a diminutive high-school aged Chicken Little (Zach Braff) insists that he’s seen a stop sign shaped chunk of the sky on the ground, causing panic and destruction in the animal town of Oakey Oaks. Little’s embarrassed father Buck Cluck (Gary Marshall) plays it off as an innocent gaffe, but Little can’t quite live it down. This makes high school rough for him and his misfit pals Abbey Mallard (Joan Cusack, an Ugly Duckling), Runt of the Litter (a rotund piglet), and Fish Out of Water (a fish wearing a diving helmet full of water).

After an unlikely baseball victory puts Little back in his father’s and the town’s good graces, another chunk of sky crash-lands in his bedroom. Turns out it’s actually a lost cloaking panel from an extraterrestrial spacecraft. From there the story becomes a goofy take on a War of the Worlds style alien invasion plot.

Compared to the recent sweeping epics like Frozen or Moana and the serious social parable Zootopia, Chicken Little feels like a feature-length Saturday morning cartoon, but that’s what makes it so much fun. As in the best cartoons, the humor comes from the characters, who are much broader comedically than those in typical Disney films. Runt of the Litter, played by the always funny Steve Zahn, is a perpetual over-reactor with a penchant for classic pop music. The wonderfully expressive Fish out of Water is unfazed and delighted by everything that happens to him, up to and including being abducted by aliens. He gets some of the best one-off bits, including constructing an Empire State Building out of homework papers and re-enacting the climactic scene of King Kong while the other characters have a serious discussion. My favorite character as a kid was the snotty popular-girl antagonist Foxy Loxy, whose pre-dodgeball declaration “PUMP IT, PUMP IT, PUMP IT UP!” became a go-to celebratory mantra for me and my brothers. She’s still pretty damn funny.

In addition to the cartoony fun, Chicken Little actually has a decently affecting emotional core in the form of Chicken Little and Buck Cluck’s relationship arc. Countless animated films are about the importance of family, whether they be biological or those constructed from unlikely companions. This can often feel a little vague and tacked-on, but Chicken Little narrows the focus down to the relationship between a father and son, and the social expectations and anxieties that go along with it. 

The CG doesn’t hold up nearly as well as Pixar movies from the same time: the textures, fur simulation, and fluid simulations are all clunky and primitive looking by comparison.  Nearly all of the non-hero characters are variations on the same generic animal model. Some of these cookie-cutter characters even have speaking roles, like the announcer at the baseball game. But none of this really distracts from Chicken Little’s strengths in terms of humor and characters. It’s an awfully fun movie with a great heart. 

Stray Observations:

  • Some clever foreshadowing — check out the pattern on Chicken Little’s bedspread.
  • Disney originally produced Chicken Little as a Silly Symphony short in 1943, an allegory about the dangers of believing in rumors during wartime. It’s pretty dark — Foxy Loxy literally reads passages from Mein Kampf. If you look at the title card, you can see the same hexagonal pattern seen in the 2005 movie. Either that’s a weird coincidence, or the Disney designers took some inspiration from it.
  • This movie definitely relies heavily on musical montages, but I’ll forgive it because they’re so much fun. I had that Barenaked Ladies song stuck in my head for days.
  • It’s pretty incredible to compare Chicken Littles primitive animal crowds animation  to the crowds work in last year’s Zootopia, in which according to fxguide featured 64 different species and 800,000 different character models.
  • For some reason, Abbey Mallard’s reaction to the cloaking panel cracks me up every time: “Bizarre!”

Netflix Pick: Force Majeure

photo_07

Force Majeure is slow, uneventful, and thoroughly entertaining. Ruben Ostlund’s arthouse black comedy is a disaster movie in which the disaster never actually materializes, leaving its characters to deal with a much bigger emotional catastrophe, to both dramatic and humorous results. It’s pretty rare to find great foreign films on Netflix, so if you’re looking to expand your cinematic palette a bit, this one’s a great place to start.

Smug Alpine vacationers Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and their two young children are the image of upper-class familial perfection at a pristine, sterile, and expensive hotel. They ski together, brush their teeth together, and sleep together in one bed wearing matching long underwear, in an image that could be mistaken for an L.L. Bean advertisement. Their bliss is abruptly interrupted by a near-miss with a controlled avalanche that sends Tomas sprinting for cover, leaving his wife and screaming kids to fend for themselves. The avalanche doesn’t hit, but Tomas’s blatant cowardice throws the family into an existential crisis.

Tomas coolly plays off his gaffe as an involuntary survival reflex, but Ebba and the kids know better. The kids ice out their parents, while Ebba questions the very foundation of her marriage. A conversation with casual polyamorist Charlotte (Karin Myrenberg) has her arguing fiercely for the value of monogamy and the traditional nuclear family, but she’s trying to convince herself more than she’s trying to convince her new friend. If it can fall apart so easily, is a family even worth having? Charlotte’s arrangement has none of the values of exclusivity, commitment, and longevity that are important to Ebba and Tomas, but she’s the happiest person at the hotel. If her relationship situation changes, fine. Her identity isn’t wrapped up in who she spends her life with.

While Ebba desperately tries to rationalize her life choices, Tomas spirals under the realization that he’s not the protective, heroic man that he’s supposed to be. Unable to face up to what happened, he copes by lying to himself, his wife, and anyone else who will listen. Although his initial action was reprehensible, his ultimate betrayal of his family lies in his inability to be honest with them in the wake of the crisis.

On top of the emotionally heavy subject matter, Ostlund’s directorial style would seem to demand a lot from the audience’s attention span. The cinematography is composed primarily of static shots, many of which last several minutes without a cut. Slow pacing and lack of conventional narrative cues also present a challenge to the viewer. But Ostlund’s clever and skillful use of “artsy” stylistic elements contribute to both comedy and suspense, making Force Majeure grippingly entertaining even at two hours running time.

In the funniest scene, we get nothing but an endless wide shot of Tomas and buddy Mats (Kristofer Hivju) lounging outside at the ski lodge, beers in hand. They are interrupted by some young ladies, only one of which we see, who build up and then promptly demolish the men’s egos. It’s a joke we’ve all seen play out before, but Ostlund’s direction makes it fresh. A typical director would likely include a number of cuts in this type of scene, but the voyeuristic nature of the static camera makes the moment feel realistic and spontaneous.

Ostlund’s deliberate style is also used to great dramatic effect. Long periods of inactivity build suspense to the point where we’re certain something is about to happen, even though the plot gives us no indication as to what that might be. Far being boring, the tension kept me glued to the screen.

Force Majeure has been on Netflix for quite a while, so I’d give it a try before it gets booted, even if you’re not typically inclined to arthouse fare. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Netflix Pick: Dope

dope-photo-facebookJumbo

In this (maybe) ongoing feature I’ll talk about a movie that’s currently on Netflix streaming.

At various times in my movie-loving life (read: my life), I have had what I will refer to as a Default Movie. A Default Movie is one that I enjoy so much that I will watch it by default when there’s nothing else new or particularly interesting to watch (hence the name). When I was a kid, my brother and I watched The Lord of the Rings on a near weekly basis for what seemed like several years. In college, I used to carry around my DVD copy of American Graffiti in my backpack so that I could watch it whenever I wanted. Now the optical drive has disappeared from my MacBook, and Netflix has become my primary movie-watching medium. It’s how The Aviator and the The Big Lebowski entered my life, both of which became my Default Movie for the span of about three months apiece.

In the spring of this year, right around the time I should have been studying for my graduate school finals, I discovered director Rick Famuyiwa’s hip-hop infused high school comedy Dope and watched it three times in the span of a week. New Default Movie. Since then, I’ve had a little time to think about why the film stuck with me the way it did.

Dope opens with a definition of the titular word on a black background: it can mean a drug, a stupid person, or a slang term for excellent. All three definitions are explored in the film that follows.

The story centers on Malcolm (Shameik Moore), a young geek who lives in The Bottoms, a gang-ridden neighborhood of Inglewood, with his buddies Diggy (Kiersey Clemons)  and Jib (Tony Revolori). The trio enjoy “white shit”, such as Skateboards, Donald Glover, and Applying To College. Being a geek in The Bottoms isn’t easy: Jib suggests that someone should make “an app like Waze to avoid all these hood traps” as they try to navigate home without a run-in with the local chapter of the Bloods, who routinely try to confiscate their sneakers and bicycles.

The kids get roped into attending a drug dealer’s birthday party, where a mix-up during a police raid leaves Malcolm saddled with a huge amount of illegal drugs the day before his interview for Harvard. It’s a modern re-working of Risky Business, except this time the kid actually deserves to go to the Ivy League school.

Dope is the funniest movie I’ve seen all year. The three leads have comedic chops in spades, and the cast of bad guys and weirdos they encounter are just as hilarious. A standout scene occurs when the kids encounter Jaleel (Quincy Brown), a wannabe gangster who lives in upscale Ladera Heights. He’s so obsessed with his imagined status as a Blood that he replaces the letter C with the letter B when he speaks to show his disdain for the Crips, in a case of what Jib labels “criplexia”. It’s ridiculous, but also speaks to the complicated politics of gang-adjacent communities. Jaleel lives comfortably away from the dangers of the gangs, yet still feels a need to maintain an identity that ties him to them.

This struggle between the desire to escape Inglewood and the desire to gain some status within it permeates Dope. Kids like Malcolm are stuck in the middle, wanting a better life but hampered by the reality that gaining one will be seen by many as a betrayal of their roots. This concept runs deep in hip-hop music, but before seeing Dope, I didn’t really understand it.

Bonus Spotify pick: Dope’s soundtrack is of course loaded with awesome 90’s hip hop (you can skip the cringey pop-punk songs that Pharrell wrote).