Behind Disney's Chicken Little

For the "disturbed" corn, or the corn that interacted with physical forms, clusters (think handles of grouped, animatable sections) were put on the stalks in order to keyframe certain actions the stalks would do, such as swaying in a specific direction. When the heroes barreled through the stalks, forcing the corn to react to their shapes (mainly that of the rotund "The Runt of the Litter" pig character), soft-bodies were applied to drive the cornstalks, affecting the shape of the cornfield with one drag of the mouse. When a clump of corn had to be blown to the ground by the influence of atomic -like pressure, the animators used field-dynamics on a bunch of cornstalks, making it as easy to collapse them to the earth as, again, a drag of the mouse. To create the crop-circle effect for the birds-eye-view shots, proxy painting was used. A control directed a given motion-path over the corn (a design that was drawn on Maya and applied to the corn field), and following it, viola! Crop circles. Each of these systems – the different fields of corn -- were scripted (or "glued") together in the end to make a visually seamless cornfield that sways, bends, chops, reshapes, collapses, and forms alien images. Very impressive.

Now, remember that thought you held? Well, for the Q & A, an inquiring mind asked about story changes throughout the production process. The panel, which was flying on its own excitement throughout the presentation, suddenly became a little edgy and tight-lipped. They did say that it wasn't until deep into the five-year project that the main character changed genders due to the creative input of top storyman Michael Eisner (insert eye roll here), who asserted that size was more of an issue with boys than with girls. Mark Austin said that originally, Foxy Loxy was going to be a co-star to Chicken Little. All this and more may explain why the story is in the shape it's in.