When watching Chicken in the Rough, I was struck by a
feeling that I had seen this short before, or at least something similar. Chip and Dale were a new addition, but this
seemed awfully familiar. That’s a hazard
when watching ALL the Disney shorts, and when I started doing some digging, I
found out that my feeling was correct.
Chicken in the Rough borrows liberally from animation first used in
Farmyard Symphony, a 1938 Silly Symphony short.
That doesn’t diminish its humor, though, as on the whole it’s a fairly
silly and fun use of the chipmunks.
I point out that it does reuse animation, however, to
further the point I have made many times about the Disney studio under Walt
Disney – they were a business. As much
as many fans and the company themselves wants to paint the portrait of Uncle
Walt who despised revisiting things and only did original work, there were
deadlines to meet, films to churn out and sometimes shortcuts were taken. In the case of Chicken in the Rough, it was
reusing characters from Farmyard Symphony so that some animation could be used
again and the model sheets were already developed for these characters.
The use of Father and Mother Chicken from that earlier short
works very well here, as Chip and Dale get sucked into their world while Mother
Chicken is waiting for her eggs to hatch.
While Dale thinks the eggs are giant nuts, he ends up accidentally
hatching one of them himself. Since the
chickens are not known for their mild tempers and easygoing nature, this
becomes a problem, and Dale soon finds himself having to substitute for the
chicken.
The best gags in the short are Dale’s attempts to hide and
reconstitute the egg shell that the young chicken hatched. Watching him quickly assemble the shell to
hide either the young chick or himself reminded me of the Lego video games that
are so prevalent these days. Even the
sounds are somewhat the same. It’s a
quick moving, funny gag that repeats itself over and over without becoming
tired. That’s the kind of thing that was
rare to see from Disney in 1951 and the years immediately preceding it.
Chicken in the Rough ends with Dale being assumed to be part
of the chicken family by Mother Chicken, which causes no end of amusement for
Chip. It’s a fairly fun gag for the
audience as well. The biggest issue with
the short is its pacing, as it starts very slowly with Chip and Dale not coming
into the picture fully until 90 seconds into a 7 minute short. That’s mainly due to the reuse of the earlier
animation, as they were obviously not in those scenes. But once they arrive, the Disney team manages
to create something new from the old, and in a pretty fun and inventive way.
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