The sky was falling on Chicken Little and on Disney’s animation heritage. With this film, the company is trying to rediscover its legacy while playing catchup in the competitive CG marketplace. All images © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All righ

It’s rather apt that Chicken Little (opening Nov. 4, 2005) represents Disney’s first full foray into 3D animation. The sky was truly falling on its once esteemed traditional heritage, and the studio could not longer resist diving head first into the virtual world of the computer and reinvigorate its brand of storytelling.

But lest anyone think that Disney is merely trying to out-Pixar Pixar and out-Shrek Shrek with Chicken Little by trying to be hipper and more self-reflexive, with its bright and shiny zippiness, core parental concern and pop culture jokes, there’s a deeper strategy: Disney Feature Animation is also trying to rediscover its legacy while playing catch up in this competitive CG marketplace.

In fact, Disney admits at the very outset that Chicken Little marks a new beginning. In voice over, Chicken Little’s father, Buck Cluck (Garry Marshall), chucks the obsolete “Once Upon a Time” and turning storybook pages conventions, and merely begins where things “started to go wrong.” Only in this version, Chicken Little (Zach Braff) doesn’t incite mass hysteria without good reason — he saves his town from an alien invasion and, more important, bonds with his clueless father. And while Buck must learn his way in a challenging new world, so must the Disney animators.

Thus, the trick for Disney with Chicken Little and the rest of its announced slate — Meet the Robinsons (2006), American Dog (2007) and Rapunzel Unbraided (2008) — is figuring out how to be fresh and familiar at the same time. “Half the Chicken Little crew were traditional animators that we retrained,” explains Disney Feature Animation president David Stainton. “We didn’t want to throw away all the talent and the lessons handed down to them from years past, and therefore maintain our legacy by retraining them in the new tools. For some companies, it would’ve been easier to start from scratch; we were committed to doing this from the very beginning. It’s fraught with opportunity and challenge. Obviously these [3D-animated] movies have done very well in the marketplace over the past few years. We’re hoping to take advantage of that and carve out our place and return to a leadership position in animation. Bring to audiences what has traditionally been Disney: great storytelling, great character acting and lush movies with a sensibility and a look to them that audiences are responding to today.

Six steps of character development — Stage 1 is the story sketch. This step uses quick story sketches to illustrate the story points and to add personality to the character.

“So I think we have a real competitive advantage because of the legacy that we bring with us through our artists. The perils are that everyone’s out there making CG movies and it reminds me of what happened after the release of Lion King, where suddenly overnight all these studios were making 2D movies like it was such an easy way to make a lot of money. I think what a lot of those people found was that it actually wasn’t so easy, and you have to make a good movie. I think the exact same thing is going to happen in CG. I think we’ve been blessed with some really good movies, with Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky making it look easy, and I think that’s made it tempting for a lot of people to get into this business. But it’s very clear that people are going to find out it’s a lot harder than they think.”

Transitioning to 3D
Of course, the transition has been fraught with growing pains for Disney too. A digital pipeline had to be set up for Chicken Little and beyond, and the infrastructure had to be revamped as well. Steve Goldberg, one of Disney’s reigning CG experts and visual effects supervisors (The Lion King and Fantasia/2000) was responsible for spearheading the transition. “We had a lot of existing toolsets courtesy of Dinosaur, but not as far as toolsets to get the character animation going and to have that level of squash-and-stretch that required us to dig deep and figure out what we needed. There were aesthetic goals, environments, effects, sheer data movements.”