Chicken Little

On paper at least, Disney’s latest character creation – a chicken with teeth – is only marginally less irritating to look at than Barney the bloody Dinosaur. Thank heavens, then, that the production team elected to give him an engagingly droll adult voice (Zach Braff) and not a twee Tweety Pie-style twitter, or you too may have felt the urge to lob grenades at the screen.

The film is being promoted as Disney’s first ever foray into computer animation. It’s not an auspicious start: the mostly unimaginative characters and backgrounds on display here are no better rendered than those in Pixar’s first ‘Toy Story’ film; and how long ago was that? Indeed, judging by the generally uncreative level of detail all round, it’s perhaps just as well that Disney has recently bought Pixar from Steve ‘Apple’ Jobs. The content of the film is no great shakes, either: the ‘cry wolf’ storyline simply isn’t strong enough to survive an 80-minute running-time and, aside from a few amusing witticisms and a couple of well-oiled film references (yawn!), most of the jokes fall flat. One can only assume its target audience will be a little easier to please.