It could have been that kind of quite stupid, quite meaningless but watchable Disney CGI as Chicken Little: very fast, full of possibilities, full of ideas thrown on the screen, full of jokes that partly fall flat... Actually, it still is (except from the flat jokes). But John Lasseter changed it a year ago. As we know, he told the director he didn't like the bad guy (didn't find him too scary) and didn't understand why the main character was an orphan. 'Because I was an orphan too', the director said, so Lasseter asked him, okay, then make us feel what it means to you, being an orphan. So he did. The result? The movie got depth - the scenes about being an orphan and getting a new family are really quite touching. The bad guy's sidekick became really evil with own diabolic plans - well, I think it created a little bit too dark aspect to this mainly pastel-colored kids' movie. There is one scene where we can see the evil sidekick's world; it looks like a scene stolen right from the floor of the editing room of The Matrix, and the family our hero loves turns into a group of kind of zombies for a minute. Even if it is not without reason (this way we can feel how much is at stake), it is simply too much, too dark.
I felt some problems with the pacing too; maybe it's because I am 30 and not 10, some scenes seemed to be too fast (e.g. meeting the Robinson family is just crazy, a total mess, the most annoying part of the movie - maybe the only annoying part) while at the beginning sometimes it was all talking heads. Also I felt for a 102-minute movie there is too much story to tell, too much crazy detail from the antagonist's and protagonist's past to the family and the dinosaur and and and..., which might be the result of John Lasseter's involvement. On the positive side, actually every scene seems to be working; the only thing this movie really needed was...time. Ten more minutes for the running time, one more year for John Lasseter perfecting the movie even more.
I felt some problems with the pacing too; maybe it's because I am 30 and not 10, some scenes seemed to be too fast (e.g. meeting the Robinson family is just crazy, a total mess, the most annoying part of the movie - maybe the only annoying part) while at the beginning sometimes it was all talking heads. Also I felt for a 102-minute movie there is too much story to tell, too much crazy detail from the antagonist's and protagonist's past to the family and the dinosaur and and and..., which might be the result of John Lasseter's involvement. On the positive side, actually every scene seems to be working; the only thing this movie really needed was...time. Ten more minutes for the running time, one more year for John Lasseter perfecting the movie even more.