BIRDS OF A FEATHER DISNEY FOLLOWS PIXAR IN THE ANIMATION REVOLUTION.

Byline: Evan Henerson Staff Writer

Misguided clucker Chicken Little might still be declaiming that ``the sky is falling!'' but within the sketch-lined halls of Walt Disney Feature Animation, teams of animators are more inclined to believe ``the sky is the limit.'' And it's Chicken Little, that fabled pint-size alarmist, who has both traditional and computer-savvy animators gazing starry-eyed into the future.

Those animators are working together, and it's now getting increasingly difficult to tell them apart.

With today's release of ``Chicken Little,'' the studio's first fully computer-generated animation feature, Disney has flung open an entirely new toolbox. Going the way of its onetime partner Pixar Animation Studios (``Toy Story,'' ``The Incredibles,''), Disney brings full three-dimensional capability to its scenes and characters without - animators claim - sacrificing any of the quaint believability of traditional two-dimensional animation.

In combination with the new look, Disney has partnered with Industrial Light and Magic to simultaneously release ``Chicken Little'' in Disney Digital 3-D in 85 theaters nationwide. But whether you're watching with glasses or without, Disney animators contend the future has arrived - and it won't have much use for pencils. Why should it when complex software allows you to fill in more than 76,000 feathers and 700 muscles on a single titular fowl?

``I'm a lover of the 2-D stuff, and it will always have a special place in my heart,'' says ``Chicken Little'' director Mark Dindal. ``But I'm really hooked on this medium. I don't want to make another 2-D movie.''

Neither does the studio, at least not for the immediate future. David Stainton, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, notes that the slate for the next several Disney films (from fall 2006's ``Meet the Robinsons'' to ``American Dog'' and ``Rapunzel Unbraided'' in 2007) all will be fully CG.

When he took over running the studio's animation arm three years ago, it was in transition, said Stainton, who describes a schism where artists trained in hand-drawn animation envisioned a pencil-free future with no job security for them, while those who had CG abilities were wondering if Disney would fully commit to the CG route, or whether they would do better to seek their fortunes at other studios. Since the release of ``Toy Story'' in 1995, Pixar and John Lasseter had led the CG wave, while DreamWorks' ``Madagascar'' showcased the rival studio's ability to jump into the ocean as well.

``At the time (I came on), my discussions focused on, 'What does this technology mean to us?' '' says Stainton. ``Are we going to chase after Pixar and DreamWorks and copy what's already out there in the marketplace or forge our own path? The answer had to be the latter. We've always been at the cutting edge of leadership in this art form, and my goal was really to reclaim that as quickly as possible.''

For ``Chicken Little,'' untrained animators went through six-month CG ``boot camps'' to bring them up to speed on Maya, the program used for 3-D modeling, animation and visual effects. Animators would ``roll off'' another film, spend several months getting up to speed on the software and be funneled directly onto ``Chicken Little.''

Several of the animators had worked on 2000's ``Dinosaur,'' which put CG characters against live-action background plates. ``Chicken Little'' represented yet another new step in animation advancement.

``It's scary to pick up new tools and try to use them,'' admits Stainton, ``but I promised the animators that the talent was within them, not within the tools. They pushed through and came out the other side, and it turned out the characteristics the artists had in using traditional methods all sort of migrated from one set of tools to the next.''

``Chicken Little'' picks up one year after the town of Oakey Oaks was thrown into a panic after young Little got plonked by an acorn and sounded the alarm bell on the apocalypse. Undersized and still a bit on the dorky side, Chicken Little (voiced by ``Scrubs'' star Zach Braff) now looks to redeem himself in the eyes of the town, of the school and, particularly, of his disappointed father, Buck Cluck (Garry Marshall). School chums Abby Mallard (Joan Cusack), Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn) and Fish Out of Water (Dan Molina) remain loyal, particularly when Chicken Little discovers a compelling reason to believe that this time the sky really is falling.

If you want evidence that ``Chicken Little'' animators are working within a new realm, look no further than a centerpiece baseball game that finds Chicken Little at the plate in a crucial situation with his team behind, runners on base and his dad watching in the stands. An inspiration for this scene was - somewhat ironically - a classic 1942 Goofy cartoon, ``How to Play Baseball,'' that had all sorts of creatures defying the laws of motion and gravity to play our national pastime.

In the current incarnation, when a stork pitcher throws a curveball, his legs elongate and spin around his body, an effect that's achievable on the computer.

``This was done by a great 2-D animator, Brian Ferguson, and it would never have been able to be done before this,'' says Jason Ryan, supervising animator for the character of Chicken Little. ``That's not even something you can see, only perceive. You'd have to freeze-frame it in order to see it.

``You've got 24 frames per each on-screen second. So on each of these frames, there's a drawing where the actual leg is bent and elongated around his body,'' he continues. ``It creates this kind of windmill effect. The whole thing is very squash-and-stretchy, very Disney.''

You'll hear ``Chicken Little'' staffers using the term ``squash-and-stretch'' quite frequently around Disney Feature Animation in Burbank. It refers to an animation technique used as early as ``Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' in 1937. Through squash-and-stretch, a character's head, hands and body are given different volumes, allowing for greater fluidity of movement. If Chicken Little's head can squish down when he ducks, for example, and then snap back into position, the character will appear more human than puppetlike.

``I design how he walks, how he talks, how he gestures, how his facial expressions work - right down to how he blinks,'' explains Ryan. ``He's the only character in the movie who doesn't have pupils, and it's really important for me to get those eye expressions really working. When he actually blinks, I'll use squash-and-stretch: squashing the actual eyes down and spreading them out to retain volume. It gives it a really nice cartoony feel and doesn't feel like a puppet or like a garage door opening and closing.''

Those 76,000 feathers on Chicken Little, by the way, easily eclipse what you'd find in nature on any bird ever hatched. Equally detailed attention went into the creation of Chicken Little's beak (shiny and a little worn, as though the character is a nail biter), comb (red, because when have you ever seen a rooster without a red comb?), shorts (worn down) and T-shirt pattern (not exactly stylin', as though someone else had probably picked out Chicken Little's wardrobe).

``We didn't scan a pair of jeans, but we did study jeans to see where they wear and what makes a pair of jeans look real to us,'' says Jason D. MacLeod, the film's leader of look development. `` `Real' is a tough one. `Believable,' `tangible.' Another word we use a lot is `appealing.' Anytime `real' started interfering with `appealing,' we just ditched the real like a bag of hot potatoes.''

Evan Henerson, [phone]

evan.henerson(at)dailynews.com

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(1 -- cover -- color) TURNING TAIL

Disney leaves old-fashioned animation behind with `Chicken Little'

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