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DIRECTED BY: Don Bluth

FEATURING: Voices of Glen Campbell, Phil Harris, Christopher Plummer, Ellen Greene, Charles Nelson Reilly, Eddie Deezen, Sorrell Booke, Sandy Duncan, Toby Scott Ganger

PLOT: Chanticleer, the rooster whose morning crow brings daylight, leaves for the big city to become a singing star after the Duke of Owls banishes sunlight.

COMMENTS: Walt Disney Animation, purveyors of fine animated fairy tales since 1937, tried in three separate decades to build a feature out of the medieval tale of the arrogant Chanticleer, whose call was thought to summon the sun. The rooster boasted a fine pedigree, including an appearance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a starring role in a play by Edmond Rostand of Cyrano de Bergerac fame, so a film showcasing a big singing bird seemed right up the studio’s alley. Alas, despite repeated attempts and the efforts of some of the Disney crew’s greatest storytellers in the studio’s history (including Uncle Walt himself), they never found a way to make the story work, finding the central character too unlikable. Maybe it’s just a point of stubborn pride that Disney apostate Don Bluth, who notoriously ditched the 70s-era Mouse House due to its lethargic approach to animation, concluded he was the man to crack the code.

Bluth’s solution was to deliver story in bulk. In addition to the source tale, we’ve got the addition of a new villain with a plot to block out the sun permanently, a mapped-on telling of the later years of a certain king of rock ‘n’ roll and his manipulative manager, the adventures of a bunch of country animals new to the city, and most oddly, a live-action framing story in which a young boy is reading the very story we have been watching, only to be dragged into it himself by a torrential rainstorm accompanied by a surprise dose of magic. The resulting movie somehow suffers both from a surfeit of plot and an alarming lack of it. There’s an awful lot going on, and it’s well-animated, but there’s not enough time for anything to get the attention it needs. (Subtract the credits, and the film barely squeezes by at an hour.) The movie is an undercooked omelet with too many ingredients.

Rock-a-Doodle reeks of post-production panic. The rapid-fire intro strongly suggests a first act hacked to pieces by studio notes and confused comment cards, and the solution seems to be enlisting Harris (a Disney mainstay making his final film appearance) to ladle more and more narration on top of the hastily edited footage in an effort to knit the disparate elements together. Logic takes a beating; it’s hard to reconcile The Duke’s plan to destroy all sunlight with the fact that Chanticleer is shown that the sun continues to rise without him.

Bizarrely, the movie consistently undercuts its best idea: Chanticleer as Elvis. It’s a cute notion to pair up the cock who heralds the sun with the pelvis stops millions of hearts, and the bird’s coxcomb is an amusing analogy to Elvis’ famed pompadour. Bluth and Co. know this is the twist that sets their version apart, and they almost go all in. Bringing in Glen Campbell to voice the character (his ability to impersonate Presley was so pronounced that songwriters frequently hired him as a stand-in for demo recordings). Enlisting Elvis’ own backing group, the Jordanaires. Lacing the film with choice elements including Vegas glitz, rockabilly tunes, and a Colonel Tom Parker analogue. And then, having gone to such great lengths to rhyme with the legend of The King, the filmmakers proceed to interfere with every single one of Chanticleer’s musical numbers, burying them beneath dialogue, sound effects, or narration. We don’t get to hear a single performance all the way through until the closing credits. Every chance to appreciate the joke is obliterated. It’s a perplexing act of self-sabotage.

Rock-A-Doodle feels like an idea that might possibly have worked if given the chance. It also feels like an idea that was thrown into the meat grinder because it didn’t work at all. It’s hard to know which is right. All we can know for certain is that Disney said no thrice, while Bluth said yes once, and it’s the little guy who probably rues his decision.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…in the end I had to surrender every shred of reason and common sense and just go along for the ride. Everything about it, from the grotesque delirium of the animated city sequences to the cornball artifice of the live action scenes with Edmond and his family, is so bizarre and tonally misjudged that it offers up a perverse kind of pleasure. I’m actually amazed that this film doesn’t have a more robust cult following – it has ‘midnight screening’ written all over it. … I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with a penchant for the weird and inexplicable.” – Scampy, The Spirochaete Trail

(This movie was nominated for review by Suren. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Rock-A-Doodle

• ROCK A DOODLE ROCK A DOODLE (1 DVD)
• PHYSICAL FILM
• HAO BOSCH

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