Chicken Little (1943) User Reviews

Despite being a WWII propaganda film, it still holds up pretty well.

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 13 August 2012]

This Disney short is a bit preachy, but in its original incarnation, it was a lot more obvious and a lot more dated. That's because Walt felt that the obvious references to WWII would date the film. In hindsight, although the film isn't perfect, it does hold up pretty well today.

This is a retelling of the old story of Chicken Little. It's pretty obvious that it was meant to be a metaphor for spreading and believing rumors during wartime, but no mention is made of the war--just Chicken Little and all his stupid poultry friends believing ANYTHING that the wicked Fox tells them.

I give this one a 7 despite the dated theme. Why? Because the Fox is a great character and I loved the very dark and twisted ending. Well worth your time.

One negative, by the way, was the film's use of repetitive animation. Like the lower quality Hanna-Barbera films of the 60s, you see the same images again and again--in the hopes that the audience wouldn't notice this. I certainly did.

not really for children

[didi-5 · 6/10 · 4 March 2007]

I remember reading the 'Chicken Little' book as a child but this cartoon turns it on its head with one eye on the time it was made, 1943, during the Second World War.

The sly and hungry Foxy Loxy reads from a text which describes how to lie and cheat your neighbours - in this case to persuade Chicken Little and others than the sky is falling, and so the world is about to end.

It showcases the power of propaganda, panic and persuasion to achieve an aim (Foxy of course wants a hearty supper of chickens and ducks). Cocky Locky is the political leader who gets depicted as a fool, while Henny Penny and her cronies spread gossip and hysteria.

A clever cartoon, perhaps too sophisticated for children, but enjoyable on some levels to a younger audience with a bit of forethought, a bit like 'Animal Farm'.

A Darker Version of the Classic Tale

[Michael_Elliott · 27 June 2015]

Chicken Little (1943)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

This famous tale takes a different meaning as Disney used the classic story for a WWII propaganda short. A fox plans to not catch one chicken but instead catch them all so he locates the dumbest one and tells him that the sky is falling. Soon the rest of the chickens are in a panic thinking disaster really is coming. As the war went on, the studios were becoming much darker in some of the films they released and that included Disney and their children programs. This eight minute short has the famous tale that most people are going to know but what makes this version so good is the incredibly dark and sinister ending. I'm certainly not going to spoil the ending but it packs a punch even when seen today and there's no question that the studio had a message to deliver. The fox character was extremely well-written and there's no doubt that the animation was quite good. Fans of these types of animated films will certainly enjoy it.

Disney at its darkest

[Horst_In_Translation · 6/10 · 14 January 2018]

"Chicken Little" is a cartoon from 1943 that runs for almost 9 minutes and has its 75th anniversary this year. It's a Disney production as you can see by the names who made it (Geronimi etc.) and the voice actors (Nash etc.) that all worked prolifically during that time. This one here really is a prime example of cartoons reflecting the current political climate as these were the days of WWII and you can either interpret the fox as Hitler and the title character as one of his aides or you see the fox as ideology and Chicken Little as Hitler. I personally would go with the former. Anyway, the ending shows you that the times of unrealistic feel-good happy endings are over as the people need to make the right decisions themselves and if they don't, then tragedy is inevitable. Also you rarely see psychology as such a dominant aspect in a Disney cartoon. Sure you could argue if the fat rich male cock really should be considered the good guy or if he represents other values worth despising, but lets just accept it this way. I think comedy-wise it may be nowhere near Disney's finest from this glorious era, but in terms of contemporary relevance and symbolisms, metaphors etc. this is an absolute must-see, so maybe it is even a better watch for (film) historians than for cartoon lovers. Anyway, I give it a thumbs-up without hesitation. Go see it.

Atypical Disney short, in more ways than one.

[llltdesq · 10/10 · 22 May 2004]

There will be spoilers to one degree or another in here.

During World War II, Disney produced a number of cartoons for general release that were propaganda aimed at fueling the war effort. While most of these were still humorous in tone as well as serious in message, two were notably different: Education For Death, the most grimly serious short produced by a Hollywood studio I've ever seen and this one, Chicken Little, in which the humor is sharply limited and the ending is most un-Disney in nature. Disney has been taken to task (often with justification) for taking fables, fairy tales and other old source material and making it far more sweet than it originally was. This was not done here-oh, boy, was that not done! Though there is no overt attempt to make this directly about Germany, the Nazis or Hitler, the context of the times makes it clear who the target is. The use of Hitler's concept of the "Big Lie" is a dead giveaway. Interestingly, the lack of obvious ties to the current enemy make this short less dated and it can readily be viewed as targeting any totalitarian state. There's nothing cute here and only a few laughs. The ending is a punch in the solar plexus. Look at what the fox does with the wishbones.

This is available on the Disney Treasures On The Front Lines. The set as a whole is remarkable and is worth having for any number of items it contains. It is telling that, as good as this short is, there are easily a half-dozen other things on the set that are even better. Most highly recommended. Get it while you can.

I feel so confused

[arielsiere · 6/10 · 21 June 2022]

At first i didn't know there was a 1943 short of the same title called Chicken Little even though Chicken Little had a movie back in 2005 also known as the movie that got so much hate just like Home On The Range back in 2004 and Cars 2 the third hated movie from 2011. I still like Home On The Range, Chicken Little and Cars 2 but that doesn't mean you need to take it to the extreme and treat it like it's worse than Hitler, not trying to sound like an opinion basher and i think the worst movie made by Disney is The Wild also known as the worst movie from 2006 which The Wild is a rip-off to Madagascar and the other worst Disney movie ever from 2008 is The Little Mermaid Ariel's Beginning and many more unnecesary sequels from Disneytoon Studios since it shutted down in 2018.

Disney's cynical take on Chicken Little

[TheLittleSongbird · 10/10 · 3 July 2014]

The Disney shorts have seen a large number of classics and a lot of very good shorts too, there are very few that I didn't care for. Chicken Little(1943) is very different for Disney, who have rarely been more cynical or morbid, but here different equals great results. Chicken Little is terrific, maybe not quite one of the Disney masterpieces or among my personal favourites, but is bold well-made stuff and one of the better Disney shorts of the 40s. The animation is fluid and colourful, the backgrounds moving from frame to frame smoothly and the colours as vibrant and well-textured as you'd hope. The characters are well drawn too. The music is typically lush and energetic if ever so slightly repetitive. The writing can be much enjoyed, the gems being with Foxy Loxy and his psychology book dialogue. It will admittedly most likely go over children's heads but not over adults, who be impressed and amazed by how daring Chicken Little and how much of its content it manages to get away with, considering the time when it was made. The story is very true in detail to the original story but with a unusually twisted(especially for Disney) ending that will shock the viewer as much as it shocked the narrator. It also has a point that is made clearly and not heavy-handedly, and is as relevant now as it was then with stuff that parallelled WW2 and also parallels now(especially from a militaristic viewpoint). The characters carry the narrative very well and their personalities do stand out, the most memorable and entertaining by a mile being Foxy Loxy. While Frank Graham does a superb job voicing almost all the characters(Florence Gill and Clarence Nash do their distinctive hen and duck noises), particularly the narrator- the role of which is well written and doesn't try to explain too much- and Foxy Loxy. To conclude, terrific short that succeeds at doing something different from what Disney usually do. 10/10 Bethany Cox

Not every fairytale has a happy ending.

[OllieSuave-007 · 7/10 · 23 February 2016]

I first watched this cartoon short when it was part of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, in an episode titled "Man Is His Own Worst Enemy." It was also my first time learning of the Chicken Little story. It was, honestly, a pretty sad story to watch, seeing Chicken Little and the rest of the bird family meeting an untimely fate in the hands of Foxy Loxy. Some of parts of the short was, though, pretty entertaining to see when Chicken Little and friends think the sky is falling, thereby, running around frantically. The characters were zany and the animation was great.

Overall, it's not a bad story. It gives children a harsh reality that not every story has a happy ending and that life could be pretty complicated.

Grade B-

I lesson in life that everyone should remember

[sonnythefat · 10/10 · 28 February 2006]

I saw this film many times growing up on, the "Wonderful World of Disney", And is now my favorite Disney film, It has a message that you need to use your brain in this life if you want to survive, and just who can you trust?, And the difficulty in not following the mob.I am angry with the new "disney people" for them making this new "Chicken Little" film .and this mentality that you must have a "Happy Ending" I did not know that it was made as a Propaganda film for World War II . But if you lived through Pol pot , Jim Jones , "The ice age is Coming!"or Piramid selling, you should know that this little "Big" Film will never lose its message, See it yourself.

Old Folk Tale Gets Serious Update

[Ron Oliver · 10/10 · 14 March 2003]

A Walt Disney Cartoon.

Wily Foxy Loxey uses psychological chicanery to confuse dimwitted CHICKEN LITTLE - Step 1 in his plot to plunder the poultry yard.

This unusual little film eschews a happy ending for a not-so-subtle warning against evil manipulators and gullible citizenry. Foxy Loxey could be the personification of either Hitler or Stalin and the quotes from his psychology book ('To influence the masses, aim first at the least intelligent,' 'If you tell a lie, don't tell a little one - tell a big one,' 'Undermine the faith of the masses in their leaders,' 'By the use of flattery, insignificant people can be made to look upon themselves as born leaders') are pure Marxism. As for Cocky Locky, Henny Penny, Goosey Poosey, Ducky Lucky & Turkey Lurkey - their human counterparts are only too easy to find everyday.

Veteran Disney voice artists Florence Gill & Clarence Nash can be heard making various hen & duck noises.

Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by drawings. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper; later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew comic figures on the sides of his vehicle. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Business reversals sent Disney & Iwerks to Hollywood in 1923, where Walt's older brother Roy became his lifelong business manager & counselor. When a mildly successful series with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was snatched away by the distributor, the character of Mickey Mouse sprung into Walt's imagination, ensuring Disney's immortality. The happy arrival of sound technology made Mickey's screen debut, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928), a tremendous audience success with its use of synchronized music. The SILLY SYMPHONIES soon appeared, and Walt's growing crew of marvelously talented animators were quickly conquering new territory with full color, illusions of depth and radical advancements in personality development, an arena in which Walt's genius was unbeatable. Mickey's feisty, naughty behavior had captured millions of fans, but he was soon to be joined by other animated companions: temperamental Donald Duck, intellectually-challenged Goofy and energetic Pluto. All this was in preparation for Walt's grandest dream - feature length animated films. Against a blizzard of doomsayers, Walt persevered and over the next decades delighted children of all ages with the adventures of Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi & Peter Pan. Walt never forgot that his fortunes were all started by a mouse, or that childlike simplicity of message and lots of hard work will always pay off.

a Disney short

[rebeljenn · 4/10 · 6 November 2005]

'Chicken Little' is a Disney short about the story of a chick who thinks that the sky is falling, and no one believes him. I remember watching this when I was very young -- they used to show this on the Disney channel along with their other older cartoons and cartoon shorts. (I'm not sure if they still show it or not, but Disney have seemed to have moved away from showing their older cartoons.)

Generally-speaking, this was a typical Disney animated story featuring a cute little chick and a basic storyline. As it has been years since I saw this, I don't remember too much about it other than the little chick running around saying that the sky was falling, over and over again...and no one believed him. I've since read that there were some political motives behind this cartoon, but I didn't know that when I watched it as a child.

I just recently discovered that Disney are going to be reviving / remaking Chicken Little. I hope there are no bird flu jokes.

Anti communist propaganda

[renorof-406-567413 · 27 June 2013]

To really understand this cartoon you will need to know who was the main masters of propaganda of communism, like Antonio Gramsci, Lenin, Marx etc. All the lines read from the RED book are instruction of how insert ideas in the minds of the society, taken from the books written by these socialists. It is a manual of a Cultural War, and the western Christian world is right now loosing this war.See this: "Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."

A very relevant theme after 70+ years

[mkr_bu50 · 10/10 · 30 August 2019]

I came across this short in a friends home and I was curious what it had to offer. The first couple of minutes was amusing at first, even funny at how its classifying chicken society. But as soon as the psychology book came into focus, I was immediately caught.

Control of the masses couldn't be explained any more clear than what is in this seemingly harmless innocent cartoon. In a b c points and in a very simplified scenario, you could see how mainstream television, movie productions and even social media can easily destroy not individuals, not groups but societies and countries as whole.

What used to be a way to attacking home fronts in hot wars of the past century, is now fully destructive cold wars by controlling masses into killing each other.

The irony is, How can you make any sense of the recent Netflix title, Bird Box and why introducing a bird box at all in the movie? I guess because it's an ironic connection with Chicken Little, in the way society pushes its way to self destruction once mass control is used to control it.

It's said that even a broken calendar . . .

[pixrox1 · 8/10 · 7 October 2017]

. . . is right twice a year, and Disney's CHICKEN LITTLE accurately forecasts D.J. Trump's total eclipse of the Son. Disney casts the title character here as Lowest Common Denominator Trump, but the brains behind the curtain belong to the Steve Bannon-like Foxy Loxy, whose Bible is the Breitbart Playbook. As Bannon, Foxy guides Little's Trump into bamboozling his logically-challenged flock of mostly Red State Chickens. Little is the reigning local yo-yo champ, presaging Trump's hourly vacillations between Bad and Worse. Little proves to be inordinately proud that its dad Fred ran for the Presidency of the KKK, and that another Grand Imperial Gizzard (Beauregard Sessions, played here by Cocky Locky) is in charge of Making America White Again. Foxy soon lures all the Trumpster Chickens into his Death Cave, which becomes a graveyard of wishbones. This suggests that God will Punish our formerly Great USA for allowing its KKK takeover by having the sky fall on us (presumably, a North Korean EMP blast from Outer Space). As Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate bear out CHICKEN LITTLE's Cries of Doom, who could argue with the Disney folks?

A relic of animation and a metaphor for manipulation and collective hysteria

[Elvis-Del-Valle · 8/10 · 26 March 2023]

True to the original story and filled with metaphors about Nazi Germany, this short film is an animated masterpiece. Disney has made a good animated short that is not like what we are used to seeing, but touches on a much more serious real issue. We have an ingenious antagonist whose weapon he possesses is psychology and it can already be seen that this short film touches on themes such as manipulation and mass hysteria. It is very well managed, adding the cute animation and the innocent characters that give this short a childish appearance, but with a tremendous message hidden behind it. It is certainly a valuable relic. My rating for this short film is 8/10.

When people are trying to be polite to a cook . . .

[cricket30 · 8/10 · 29 October 2021]

. . . who has just served them something atrocious to consume, such as rattlesnake dumplings or squirrel stew, Americans are culturally programmed to remark "Yum, tastes like chicken." This brief cartoon plays up such spineless consumption, detailing how a sly fox settles for a fetid feast of wish bones when he probably could have exerted himself a little more and dined upon steak. Actual Real Life cluck birds are content to live out their pathetic lives in tiny cages so small that they cannot stand up or even turn around. Incapable of fetching sticks, chasing balls or shaking hands, hens are merely fit for playing dead. Unfortunately, compared to bacon or prime rib, their pulverized nuggets taste like something the cat dragged in. Even CHICKEN LITTLE is a sight too much.