"Chicken Little" Gets Funky - Disney Insider 05/24/05
Article from Disney Insider - May 24, 2005
"Chicken Little" Gets Funky
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The Disney Insider chats with "Chicken Little" producer Randy Fullmer.
He's a little guy who turns a bonk on the head into widespread mayhem, only to become a laughingstock. We all know the story of Chicken Little - but surely we've never seen it like this! Rendered in state-of-art computer animation, Disney's "Chicken Little" follows the plucky fowl through his adventures AFTER the infamous acorn incident. Befriended by other misfits and oddities, the little guy struggles to prove himself ... until his old nemesis, the falling sky, proves to be more of a threat than even Chicken Little himself suspected.
It's fast, funny, and action-packed, with talent of the caliber of Zach Braff, Garry Marshall, and Joan Cusack - but will we fall for "Chicken Little"? Producer Randy Fullmer thinks we'll be knocked out. It's a leap forward for Disney - but from the earliest days, when Walt pioneered an unheard-of feature-length "cartoon" called "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the studio has never shied away from a challenge or a new technology.
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Six months might sound like a lot of breathing room to most of us, but this is the home stretch of a five-year process, one which united Disney Feature Animation's incomparable traditional "pencil" animators with the computer whizzes of CG animation.
"Probably half our crew had worked on 'Dinosaur' and other partially CG-animated films, and half our crew had never done that. They had worked on things like 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'The Lion King' and 'The Emperor's New Groove,' and they're pencil animators," says Randy. Using animators who are trained in traditional animation is a break with tradition - at least, insofar as an industry as young as computer-generated animation has traditions! However, the combination was a deliberate strategy on the part of the filmmakers, one that united Disney creative traditions with the cutting edge of film technology.
