This movie really was a recipe for disaster. Disney’s 2005 movie Chicken Little is one of
the studio’s most infamous movies, criticized for its poor animation and mean-spirited story and
characters. But looking on the bright side: it’s FAR from boring. Love it or hate it, it’s hard to
deny that Chicken Little is quite the exper ience, with a creative story, some charming visual gags,
and a colorful cast of characters–but which characters slip up more than others?
I’m Brad with WickedBinge, and this is Chicken Little characters: Good to Evil.
As usual, we’ll be starting with the most pure and noble character
and working our way down to the most evil. These Characters Are The Good.
Probably to nobody’s surprise, Chicken Little takes home the gold medal of good. This entire
movie is practically a compilation of bullying the poor guy over a misunderstanding. Chicken Little
believes the sky is falling, and that a piece of it hit him on the head, so he rings a giant bell
to warn the town of impending danger. However, when an acorn falls onto his head and there’s
sadly no evidence of his falling-sky theory, he’s labeled as “the crazy chicken”--and the
town gives him absolutely NO mercy for it. But with that being said, Chicken Little himself is a
great kid. He warns the townspeople of impending danger when he believes the sky is falling, and
when it turns out that–surprise, surprise–Chicken Little was NOT mistaken, he remains heroic despite
their mistreatment. It turns out that the sky WAS falling–but more specifically, the “sky falling”
was actually aliens invading the planet, thinking that their child was left behind on earth. Chicken
Little is determined to help the baby alien, Kirby, back to its parents, effectively calling
off the alien attacks on Oakey Oaks. He also shows remarkable optimism throughout the movie–he tries
his best to assure himself and his father that with just one more chance, he’ll show
the world he’s not crazy. What really cements Chicken Little as our gold medalist of good is
the lack of any particularly bad character traits–he’s wholeheartedly an altruistic,
well-intentioned kid, and the fact that he still wants any connection with his father and
his hometown in general after everything they put him through is evidence that he’s also extremely
forgiving. In a movie like this, nobody else could possibly deserve the top spot.
We’re giving the Silver medal of good to Kirby. No, not the pink one who lives in
Dream Land with King Dedede–the orange one in this movie. This adorable baby alien was left
behind by his parents on Earth, leading into the alien invasion which comprised the main conflict
of the movie’s latter half. Chicken Little helped Kirby get home, risking his neck to get him back
to his parents. Kirby repays him by helping to explain to his father that he wasn’t harmed,
and that Chicken Little and company helped him out, which is what stopped the invasion. Like
Chicken Little, he’s this high because of a lack of any bad character traits–he’s just a poor,
scared child who wants to get back to his parents, and thankfully he was able to.
Reaching the end of the good characters–yes, already–Modern Mallard magazine says Abby
Mallard should get the Bronze medal of good. Hey–who are we to disagree? This girl, nicknamed
“ugly duckling” by her schoolmates, is one of Chicken Little’s best friends–probably
the one he’s closest to. Whenever he’s in trouble, she’s the first to check up on him,
and is more or less the ringleader of his support system. She encourages Chicken Little to confront
his father over his toxic behavior, and talk to him about how he really feels–thus gaining
closure. Throughout the whole movie, she’s a loyal and genuine friend to him, and keeps pushing the
issue of seeking closure as she can see that he’s bothered by his father’s lack of support–even if
he himself rarely acknowledges it until the end of the movie. If we could say anything bad about her,
it would be that she’s a bit nosy and pushy with Chicken Little’s personal business,
likely because of her romantic feelings for him. But really, we can’t even take
many points away for that, since she’s always got the best of intentions for her friend.
And that’s the Good area! We know it’s short, but there aren’t a
lot of very nice characters in this movie…so let’s see who slipped down to The Gray Area.
And floating to the top of the gray area is Fish Out of Water. Another one of Chicken
Little’s circle of friends, Fish is…um…what is Fish, exactly? Sure, he’s clearly a walking fish
with a diver’s helmet–quite true to his name. But we’ll be honest–it’s hard to say much about him,
morality-wise. Despite being one of the movie’s main characters, Fish is more of a “Minions”-esque
character than an actual character. Acting as the wild-card comic relief with no dialogue, he’s
highly energetic, always goofing around and doing something wacky. Examples include building a tower
out of newspapers and climbing it King-Kong-style while Runt and Abby try to comfort Chicken Little,
cheering as the mascot at his big baseball game, and getting stuck on the spaceship when he rides
on the fallen piece of the sky. Sure, he’s a reliable friend to Chicken Little, seeming to
care for him as much as his other friends do and always being around to help out. But he’s more or
less unconcerned most of the time; whatever might be going on around him, and however serious it is,
Fish always has his own hijinx he’s more concerned with. This neutrality is why we place him in the
gray area, but simultaneously why we don’t place him any lower. He might not be a deep pool of
wisdom and integrity, but he’s a chill guy, and he doesn’t have any outright BAD traits.
This might be a surprising pick, but Runt of the Litter is up next. We understand your likely
confusion as to why this big, sweet, mild-mannered pig is outside of the Good territory. He’s a good
friend to Chicken Little and company, sticking by him through the awful bullying he faces after the
acorn incident. He’s the embodiment of a gentle giant, and the worst anyone could say about him on
a surface level is that he’s a bit cowardly–which, if anything, makes it more impressive that he’s
always sticking with the ostracized Chicken Little. But there’s one particular scene that
calls his morality into question: at the end of the movie, school bully Foxy Loxy returns from
the void the aliens’ victims ended up in–and she’s pretty much had her brain scrambled,
to the point where she was a hollow shell in a constant state of euphoria. After the aliens said
they could turn her back to normal, Runt insisted they keep her this way, saying “she’s perfect.”
Nobody likes a bully, sure, but this is still basically the equivalent of having the choice
to heal someone who’s been lobotomized and blatantly turning it down to date them. We’ll
give Runt a bit of leeway, since he’s just a teenager and probably didn’t mean any harm,
but…that’s still SUPER creepy. Hopefully he learns from it, because aside from this one moment,
he’s a total sweetheart–it’s a shame we have to put him so much lower for it..
Everybody say “yo” to Morkubine Porcupine. Despite his incredibly minor role,
we feel like we have to mention him on account of the fact that for some…inexplicable reason,
he’s on a lot of the marketing material for the movie despite saying literally three words in its
entire 2-hour run. We aren’t sure if this is some sort of weird inside joke, or if it’s
because this guy is just really dang cool, but we’ll go with…both, actually. He’s a cool guy,
really just saying one word whenever he shows up on screen, but he also goes along with the rest
of the town’s ostracization of Chicken Little. We’ll keep him right here in the middle. Yo.
Tina and Melvin–and the rest of the aliens, by extension–were a bit difficult to place. They’re
the main antagonists of the movie, attacking Oakey Oaks and causing mass panic and destruction–even
vaporizing several of its residents temporarily. Yet they are far from outright bad people;
they’re just trying to bring their son Kirby back home. When it’s revealed that Chicken
Little has been keeping Kirby safe, with full intentions to return him to his parents, they
find themselves utterly horrified and apologize, bringing everything and everyone in Oakey Oaks
back to the way they were–well, excluding Foxy, of course. While their intentions were noble–and
they did make up for what they did by restoring the town–they and their associates still committed
mass terrorism and destruction. This was BEYOND unnecessary, as Oakey Oaks is a small town that
doesn’t seem to have many defenses of any time. They could’ve just…asked if anyone
had seen their kid. With all that considered, we can’t possibly call them good. But we are willing
to call them “not quite bad.” Our cue cards say that Turkey
Lurkey is up next. A gag character with only a few appearances in the movie, Turkey Lurkey is
the mayor of Oakey Oaks. But we’re honestly not sure why. Most of what he says and does is just
reading off of cue cards provided by his cronies, and what he DOES do of his own volition isn’t very
impressive. He offers to surrender the town to the alien invaders, offering them the key to his
city. He’s a coward without any real conviction or leadership skills, or any preparation for
disaster…but he’s nice enough to offer people a Tic-Tac, so we’ll keep him out of the Bad area.
And you know what that means! It’s time for the dark side. These characters are The Bad to Evil.
We’ll start off the many bad guys of the movie with Foxy
Loxy. The school bully of Oakey Oaks, she’s just plain mean, and is generally the ringleader of
harassment at Oakey Oaks Middle School. She calls Abby Mallard an “ugly duckling”--yeah,
we were quoting her on that–and ruthlessly hassles Chicken Little, even pouring out a bag of acorns
from the school bus to make him trip and fall while he was left behind desperately trying
to keep up. The best we can say about Foxy is that she seems to have at least some compassion,
as she comforts Buck when he’s upset over Chicken Little seemingly “lying” to the
town again. We’ll get to you later, Buck. But overall, Foxy is bad news–and no, her
post-movie lobotomized personality doesn’t count. We actually feel pretty bad for her over that…
And where would a school bully be without their goons? Goosey Loosey is up next. It
might seem weird for us to call her worse than Foxy, considering that–like we said earlier–Foxy
is the ringleader, and by extension, Goosey Loosey is just following orders. But that doesn’t excuse
the excessive violence she puts Chicken Little through–and who knows how many other students?
Like Foxy, she takes great pleasure in tormenting people. Further still, when Foxy is vaporized
by the aliens, Goosey runs away and shows no concern for her. It’s understandable to run away,
of course, but…come on, show SOME concern for your supposed friend. Foxy at least had some
arguably decent qualities, but we can’t say that for Goosey–so she’s a bit lower.
Coach takes home the bronze medal of evil. It’s one thing for students to bully each other,
but for an adult in charge to encourage it is even worse. That’s exactly what Coach does;
he splits teams into popular and unpopular kids during dodgeball, and when one of the
latter asks to review safety guidelines, he outright tells everyone to hit him. As a coach,
he’s also very discouraging to Chicken Little–and Chicken Little turned out to be pretty good,
considering that he actually won the game for the Acorns. Not much else to say–awful teacher,
awful coach…just an awful guy all around.
Alright, here’s the character most of you have probably been waiting for–Buck Cluck lands the
silver medal of evil, but…MAN, do we wish we could put him even lower. Buck is the most infamous part
of this movie, as well as probably one of the most infamous characters in Disney history–and with
some darn good reason. He’s got to be one of the worst fictional parents out there, letting his son
be treated as a scapegoat on account of the acorn incident. He doesn’t stick up for him at all,
instead encouraging him to “lay low” until things blow over…even a year after the incident.
At no point does Buck defend his son at all, treating him as a burden, embarrassment and a
disappointment. He constantly discourages him, telling him to not get his hopes too high when
he wants to join the baseball team, and only shows him any kind of love when he wins the big baseball
game. He’s one of those parents who makes his child earn his love. But as aggravating as he is,
we have to give him slight credit on account of the fact that he does actually apologize to
Chicken Little once he’s called out on his crappy behavior. It’s nice that he’s at least making an
effort to be a better father–but it’s a very, VERY forced effort, and it’s not quite enough
to redeem him for how awful he was over the course of the movie. What’s more is that Buck is sticking
with and supporting Chicken Little now, that he has success and the town’s favor. But with
how difficult it was for Buck to even pretend he supported his son, we wouldn’t be surprised
if he bailed again the moment trouble came up. Screw you, Buck. Anyone else craving some KFC?
And the gold medal of evil goes to…Pretty Much Everyone Else in Oakey
Oaks. This entire town is bullying a child over a misunderstanding. From children to grown adults,
everyone is constantly pushing this poor kid around even a year after the incredibly minor
event–and NOBODY sees an issue with it! They make movies about him, call him names,
constantly harass him–and what makes this even worse is that Chicken Little was trying to help
them! He thought the town was in genuine danger, warned them, was ultimately right,
and got abused for it. The worst part is that, excluding Buck, nobody even remotely apologizes
to Chicken Little for this. They just go from hating him to worshiping him as a celebrity–what
a bunch of two-faced jerks. No wonder many find this movie way too mean-spirited...
For the grand finale,
let’s give out some medals–before they make our list into a Hollywood movie.
The Darwin Medal goes to Foxy Loxy. Come on–how did you EXPECT just walking right up and attacking
one of the alien robots to go?! The Lust Medal belongs to Abby
Mallard. It’s pretty clear that her loyalty to and friendship with Chicken
Little is mainly due to her crush on him. The Sloth Medal goes to mayor Turkey Lurkey,
for not even having enough gumption to publicly speak or act without cue cards.
The Wrath Medal has to go to the townspeople. It’s been a year, you jerks–get over it already!
The Gluttony Medal belongs to Runt, for his frequent stress-eating habits.
Lastly, there’s no doubt that The Pride Medal goes to Buck Cluck,
who cared more about his own reputation than his son’s wellbeing.
But let us know what you think. Be sure to hit that notification bell and binge our Good to
Evil playlist. Where we break down the morality of the characters in your favorite cartoons,
movies and games. But most importantly, stay wicked.