That was an excellent one.

Absolutely Fantastic

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The fifth movie by Don Bluth, and probably the first one where his signature moves really got the best of him. It once again features anthropomorphic animals acting out the plot, with lots of gorgeous animation, nonsensical songs, bratty child characters and extremely jumpy storytelling.Chanticleer is a rooster living on a farm, and his job is to bring out the sun every morning with his crow. Unfortunately the Grand Duke of Owls prefers the night and tricks the other farm animals to see Chanticleer as a fraud and chase him away. But then the long night settles in and suddenly it's the mission of the animals and one little human boy named Edmond to find their missing friend and bring back the sun. Sounds pretty basic when you put it like that. But it's not. It's unbelievably weird in execution. Chanticleer has become Elvis, the Duke's magical powers are expressed through his breath, Edmond starts out as a live-action character but is turned into a kitten, et cetera, et cetera.And nothing really connects with anything. It's full of interesting little touches, but the plot itself is nonsensical and moves with the speed of a freight train, not allowing anything to sink in before we've already moved to something else. The songs are also pretty lame, though there's a catchy tune every now and then.All in all, I'd call Rock-A-Doodle a passable film. It's weird and hard to follow, but the characters are nice, the animation is still great and at least it's memorable.

Rock-a-doodle is one of the many poorly conceived animated films from ex-Disney animator Don Bluth, who was known through the 80s and 90s for making boring kiddie animated movies. This movie was different from Bluth's previous films, animation wise. In his previous films, the character designs were all very loose, and the animation was kind of dull. Here, the character designs are more solid, and though much of the movie has a weird sepia toned color, it still looks great. As for plot and dialogue, this is pretty terrible.Chaunticlare the rooster (voiced by Glenn Campbell) sings the sun up every morning, but after he is attacked by an evil owl named the Duke (Christopher Plummer), he is ridiculed and leaves the farm for the city. The next scene shows that this is actually a story, and the movie briefly switches to live action to introduce Edmund, the young protagonist. Edmund's mother is reading him the story of Chaunticlare during a storm, but stops to help her husband. During the height of the storm, Edmund shouts out Chaunticlare's name, which somehow makes the Duke become real and turn Edmund into an animated cat. Now Edmund, and a few barnyard animals, led by Patou, the hound dog (Phil Harris), are headed off to the city to find Chaunticlare and make him crow again to make the sun come up.This whole movie just doesn't make sense. The Duke's evil powers are confusing. Why can an owl magically shape shift animals and himself. He was more of a genie than an owl. Why was this story real, and why was Edmund turned into a cat, other than the purposes of making a cute cartoon character. Why did Edmund immediately forget about his parents and start only caring about the cartoon animals he doesn't know? The answer to all these...because this was a poorly written movie.Rock-a-doodle is a good movie for kids, meaning they will enjoy it. Adults will not. The plot makes no sense. The animated sets are the saving grace for me. Some of the sets in this film are really great looking, and are fun to look at...which makes eye candy the main attraction to this bizarre cartoon. The characters are kind of cute, and have odd chemistry together, but overall, this is a weird kiddie flick that adults will find very boring.My rating: ** out of ****. 75 mins. Rated G.

This film is one of the most undeservedly underrated of the good old Bluth movies, I think. It takes the classic fish out of water idea to another level. This is a theme I noticed with a lot of movies of that time, where creativity was much more free. The archetype of a lone hero who is thrust into a strange place with no way back and has to make fight or flight of the situation.In this story, Edmond, the protagonist, is transformed into a tiny kitten against his will and taken from all that he knows with little more than the shirt (And fur) on his back, having to use his human mind to aid the clutch of critters that have been dispatched to retrieve the exiled Chanticleer and get him to sing the sun back.This also introduces the theme of the hero stacked against towering odds... Not only is danger around every corner for one as small as him, but the very person he seeks to coax into returning doesn't want to come back.This isn't one to pass up, folks. To Hell with Rotten Tomatoes' rating!

I don't know what Don Bluth was thinking when he made this silly, nonsensical animated musical about a singing rooster, but I know what I'm thinking: "Why?" ROCK-A-DOODLE isn't as depressing or dreary as Bluth's previous ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN, but it's not much better.The film tells the story of Chanticleer, a barnyard rooster with a golden voice whose crooning -- sorry, crowing -- makes the sun rise every day. One morning, however, Chanticleer is attacked by a bully rooster; in the process he neglects his crowing duties and the sun comes up anyway. After being laughed at by his friends, the disgraced rooster heads off to the city. Then it starts to rain, and before long, all the animals are terrorized by both floods and the evil Grand Duke of Owls, who, it turns out, actually set up the whole thing simply because he dislikes the sun. In arguably one of the few memorable lines this movie offers, he also sneers, "I positively LOATHE rock and roll."Naturally, the animals head off to the city to find Chanticleer, who, by this point, has become a famous star dubbed "the King," with a greedy manager and a reluctant girlfriend, Goldie. If the animals can bring Chanticleer back to the farm, the sun will once again rise and the floods will stop. To prevent this, the Duke sends his clumsy (and unfortunately not very funny) nephew, Hunch (whose vocabulary mostly consists of rhyming with the word "annihilation") after the animals.The plot, such as it is, doesn't make the least amount of sense and is likely to baffle even the most intelligent of grown-ups. Working against ROCK-A-DOODLE as a whole, however, is the haphazard and confusing execution. It also suffers from the problem of a major identity crisis: on one hand it tries to be a simplistic fairy tale, on the other it attempts to be a musical parody of Elvis (Chanticleer's rock star persona and his songs are very closely modeled after the legendary singer, from the slick hairdo to the deep voice and the mannerisms). However, it ultimately comes across as a hodgepodge of ideas crashing into each other.Furthermore, the characters, in addition to being unattractively designed, are not particularly compelling. Chanticleer, while supplying a dead-on impression of Elvis Presley down to the voice and the singing (courtesy of Glen Campbell), is a two-dimensional lead. His barnyard friends, which include Patou, a droopy canine unable to tie his shoes, Peepers, a bespectacled and lisping mouse, and Snipes, a zany magpie, do little to emerge as anything memorable, although the first two are well voiced by Phil Harris and Sandy Duncan, respectively. Hunch, as mentioned, is unfunny, and useless. That leaves the character of Goldie, Chanticleer's love interest, who is supposed to be a tough girl that eventually falls in love with our hero, but the screenplay doesn't give her much to do. One suspects that she was included in this film just for the sake of a love interest. As for the Grand Duke, he's little more than your typical scary, nasty, scheming bad guy, despite having the voice of Christopher Plummer. And don't even get me started on where his supernatural powers (that enable him to grow to enormous size or transform anybody) came from.Where ROCK-A-DOODLE really falls apart is in its attempt to bookend the movie with live-action sequences. The idea is to include a real-life little boy, Edmond, as one of the story's major protagonists. Actually, he spends much of the film transformed as an animated kitten (a transition that feels very awkward and unnatural). And whining about how he is unable to do anything as a result of being small. Constantly. This subplot feels like it was tacked onto the story, hence one gets the feeling that it came out of nowhere.There are also two live-action/animation sequences in the movie, but unlike WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, they come across as very patchy and unconvincing--the real-life surroundings don't mesh well with the drawings, and it looks especially bad at the song and dance finale when the kid actor playing Edmond, Toby Scott-Granger, is brought back to the cartoon world. Speaking for the animation itself, it's pretty much below par, even for a Bluth production.Equally distracting is the narration that supplies most of the film. Phil Harris has a great voice and does a credible job (although some might find it strange that the dog is recounting the whole thing). The problem is that he narrates CONSTANTLY, even going far to chime in over some catchy songs sung by Chanticleer. Considering that this film is supposed to be a musical, having Harris chime in every two minutes proves to be very distracting. (The narration was apparently added on to prevent audiences from being confused, but why did they have to overdo it?)Probably the only things that come clean out of this mess are the voice work and the musical score by Robert Folk. Campbell, Harris, Duncan, Plummer, and squeaky Ellen Greene (as Goldie) all do the best they can with their characters, although Toby Scott-Granger's childish speech impediment does get in the way of his portrayal of Edmond (although considering how weak his character is, it's no surprise he doesn't give a memorable performance). The underscore, as mentioned, is also beautiful, far better than this movie has any right to be. T.J. Kuenster's dozen songs, on the other hand, are mediocre to bad, particularly the owls' Bach-style numbers, although the ones for Chanticleer are admittingly a lot of fun.As entertainment, ROCK-A-DOODLE is mostly harmless fare for younger kids. It has its funny moments, but anyone else older will find this to be uninspired and chaotic. Considering that this is from the director of THE SECRET OF NIMH, AN American TAIL, and THE LAND BEFORE TIME, its a disappointing endeavor.