On my recent trip to my in-laws for Christmas, I got the opportunity to see quite a few movies with my nieces and nephews. Chicken Little was on the DVD player, so I had the opportunity to watch it.

Chicken Little is Disney’s first fully rendered computer graphics animation, throwing in its hat to compete with the Pixar folks (who once worked with Disney, but no longer). Now that these kinds of movies have become ubiquitous--see any movies about talking fuzzy animals lately?--there's actually a standard to compare these films. Unfortunately for the competition, Pixar has set the bar very high.

We all know the story: the eponymous Chicken Little (Zach Braff, he of Scrubs fame) is outside playing when a piece of the sky hits him on the head. Freaking out in grand fashion, Chicken Little proceeds to tell everyone that the sky is falling. Only it isn’t, and Little kind of looks like a fool, because he overreacted. It wasn’t actually a piece of the sky falling, you see. And thus we have a simple fairy tale similar to the boy crying wolf: Don’t overreact to potentially bad news, or people won’t believe you when there IS bad news.

That’s the first five minutes of Chicken Little.

Moving forward in time, we see that Chicken Little has it rough. His mom is nowhere to be found, and his exasperated dad, Buck Cluck (Garry Marshall), tries to keep up with his son’s eccentricities. A huge geek, Chicken Little suffers a host of indignities that life throws at him (nearly getting run over, getting pummeled in dodgeball, losing his pants, the list goes on and on) but Little overcomes them with cheerful ingenuity. Facing the thousand cuts of school along with Little are his friends Abby Mallard AKA the Ugly Duckling (Joan Cusak), the very fat pig known as Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn), and the weird Fish Out of Water (Dan Molina). Their arch nemesis is Foxy Loxy (Amy Sedaris).

All Chicken Little really wants to do is make his dad proud. So he joins a baseball team and, like a typical feel-good coming-of-age sports parable, makes the winning play and earns the love of friends, family, and the community. It’s like a film within a film.

Then the sky falls again. Finally, Chicken Little switches to the actual plot: a War of the Worlds-style invasion by aliens. Of course.

So what exactly is wrong with an underdog character overcoming an alien invasion, the prejudices of the community, poor past judgment, and did I mention an alien invasion?

TOO ADULT. Whereas the Pixar films speak to both adults and kids, Chicken Little talks down to kids and throws in stupid slapstick that feels pointless, just to keep the little ones entertained. Then it adds in awkward adult scenes in parts where it doesn’t make sense. Do we really need a romance (and a kiss!) between Abby and Little? Or Runt singing, “If You Wanna Be My Lover”? Worse, many of the in-jokes are very dated.

TOO UGLY. Pixar characters are undeniably cute, be it a fish, a car, an ant, or a toy. Chicken Little is an ugly little toad; his feathers look like spines, his eyes are beady, and he has a tiny beak for his massive head. Runt is grossly overweight, Abby is literally an ugly duckling, Fish Out of Water is completely nuts…these are not characters you readily connect with. Braff’s voice acting goes a long way in making Little a likable character, but it takes awhile.

TOO SCI-FI. I actually liked this movie a lot, once I realized it was a riff on War of the Worlds. How often do CGI cartoon characters run screaming from aliens? Okay, they did it in Jimmy Neutron too. The problem is that Chicken Little switches abruptly from a cute morality play to terrifying invasion scenario that involves characters getting zapped out of existence. They all turn out to be okay later, of course, but it sure as heck looks like the aliens killed the cute characters.

That said, my niece and nephews watched it twice. All three of them (my twelve-year-old nephew, seven-year-old niece, and my three-year-old godson) loved it. So perhaps where Chicken Little fails in its pseudo-appeal to adults, it succeeds with the kids. Or maybe they just like to see a fat pig run from alien tripods.