Chicken Little (U) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Disney takes on Pixar at its own game and almost bursts a blood vessel in the process. The children's fable, about the chicken that believed the sky was falling in, is given a full 21st-century refit as the titular hero (voiced by Zach Braff) goes through a vaguely Spielbergian rite of passage involving baseball, alien invasion and father-son bonding.

It is completely insufferable. The frenetic energy of the set-pieces cannot compensate for the continuous stream of psychobabble, movie parodies and awful songs (including a murder of Jimmy Webb's "All I Know"), and was never likely to. The Disney animators have done a bang-up technical job (we are assured that 76,000 individual feathers were created for Chicken Little) but the one thing they're unable to fake is charm. This chicken has been battery-farmed.