In CHICKEN LITTLE, our title hero (voiced by Zach Braff) is a schoolkid whose classmates include pigs, ducks, foxes, fish and a cool porcupine. Chicken's well-meaning father Buck Cluck (voiced by Garry Marshall), a high-school baseball star, can't understand his boy, but incomprehension gives way to embarrassment when Chicken is hit on the head by something that he thinks is part of the sky but which appears to be only an acorn. This makes Chicken the town joke a year later, there's still fallout (with bumper stickers, billboards and even an upcoming movie), but Chicken determines to turn his life around with the unlikely mechanism of baseball. However, just when things take a turn for the better, something falls on his head again. This time, Chicken gets a good look at it and the item in question is not of this world.
The premise in the script by Steve Bencich & Ron J. Friedman and Ron Anderson, from the story by Mark Dindal and Mark Kennedy, is actually pretty good. However, the writers and director Dindal take every opportunity to stop the show with characters breaking into pop hits of yesteryear and brief spoofs of moments from other movies (everything from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK to WAR OF THE WORLDS). There's a sense that the filmmakers don't fully have their own attention, which makes it very hard for us to give them ours. Character arcs are drawn so broadly, and with so little zest for doing something new with the paradigms, that the retro songs and vaguely '50s look, instead of seeming playful, give the whole enterprise an over-familiar feel.
There are some truly funny bits here (this reviewer's personal favorite: Patrick Stewart as a sheep schoolteacher giving a foreign language lesson) and the animation is skillful, but the cumulative effect is of watching three consecutive episodes of some network-sanctioned kid's show with a moral but not much real personality.
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