Rock-a-Doodle

Rock-a-Doodle
VHS cover
Directed by	Don Bluth
Screenplay by	David N. Weiss
Story by	Don Bluth John Pomeroy David J. Steinberg David N. Weiss T.J. Kuenster Gary Goldman
Produced by	Gary Goldman John Quested Morris Sullivan
Starring	Glen Campbell Sorrell Booke Christopher Plummer Charles Nelson Reilly Ellen Greene Sandy Duncan Eddie Deezen Phil Harris Toby Scott Ganger Will Ryan
Cinematography	Robert Paynter
Edited by	Lisa Dorney Dan Molina Fiona Trayler
Music by	Robert Folk T. J. Kuenster (songs)
Production companies	Goldcrest Films Sullivan Bluth Studios
Distributed by	The Samuel Goldwyn Company Rank Organisation (United Kingdom)
Release dates	August 2, 1991 (1991-08-02) (United Kingdom) April 3, 1992 (1992-04-03) (United States)
Running time	76 min.
Countries	Ireland United Kingdom United States
Language	English
Budget	$18,000,000
Box office	$11,657,385

Rock-a-Doodle is a 1991 Animated musical comedy/fantasy film loosely based on Edmond Rostand's comedy, Chantecler. This film was directed by Don Bluth, produced by Goldcrest Films for The Samuel Goldwyn Company, and originally released in the United Kingdom and in Ireland on August 2, 1991, and in the United States on April 3, 1992. The film features the voices of Glen Campbell, Christopher Plummer, Phil Harris, Charles Nelson Reilly, Sandy Duncan, Eddie Deezen, Ellen Greene and Toby Scott Ganger.

Plot

Edmund is a human boy and his favourite story is about a rooster named Chanticleer who proudly raises the sun with his crow every morning. However, the Duke of Owls, whose kind dwells in darkness can't stand the bright sun every day and he sends a rival crow to fight Chanticleer. Chanticleer is victorious in the fight, but forgets to crow and the sun rises without him, causing all the animals on the farm to lose all respect for him and insult him for his false nature. Chanticleer leaves the farm, and the Duke sends storm clouds to put the farm under perpetual darkness and rain. When Edmund's family is off to help save the farm from a flood, his mother forbids him to go out and help his older brothers. The dangerous situation causes Edmund to throw open the window and yell Chanticleer, but his cry summons the Duke himself. The Duke turns Edmund into a cat for trying to interfere with his plans. Just as the Duke is about to devour Edmund, he is saved by Patou (Phil Harris), the basset hound who attacks the Duke and Edmond drives the Duke off with a flashlight. Edmund also meets a magpie named Snipes and a mouse named Peepers who do not believe Edmund was once a human boy but tell him they are journeying to the city to find Chanticleer. While the rest of the animals stay at Edmund's farm, Edmund, along with Patou, Snipes and Peepers sail to the city in a trunk. The Duke sends his nephew Hunch to stop the crew from reaching the city, but Hunch fails to catch them.

Once they reach the city, they discover Chanticleer has taken the moniker "The King" in an Elvis-style show where he sings for an audience. As a distraction, his manager Pinkie, who had been hired by the Duke to keep Chanticleer away from the farm, gets a chorus singer pheasant named Goldie to distract him. Chanticleer and Goldie are immediately smitten with each other. After a short while, Goldie begins to reciprocate Chanticleer's feelings and tells him that his friends had come to find him. In the meantime, Edmund and the others were captured and imprisoned by Pinkie and his guards to keep them from contacting him and are locked in his trailer. Pinkie turns on Goldie for informing Chanticleer of what has happened and blackmails Chanticleer with the threat of killing his friends into continuing with his movie. Edmund and the others manage to escape though, (thanks to Hunch's intervention) and with Goldie and Chanticleer in tow, they make their way back to the farm. The Duke and his minions have been waiting on the farm animals' supply of batteries to run out on their flashlight. They nearly make a meal out of them, but are driven away by the spotlight of the helicopter Edmund and the others are flying.

Chanticleer discovers he's forgotten to crow and lacks the confidence to remember. When he gives up, Edmund tries to cheer him on by chanting his name. The Duke then enters the scene and being enraged by this, the Duke strangles Edmund into unconsciousness to shut him up. Chanticleer tells the Duke that his fight is with him and not Edmund. Inspired by Edmund's selflessness and bravery, Patou and the other animals begin to chant Chanticleer's name and Duke turns into a whirling tornado to eliminate the crow for good. Finally Chanticleer gains the confidence and manages to crow loud enough for the sun to come up. The owls are driven off and Duke's powers are reversed, making him a miniscule version of himself, smaller even than Hunch, who decides to take revenge on the behavior the Duke had shown him by attacking him with a fly swatter.

Believing Edmund dead, the animals mourn his loss, and the spell that the Duke cast on him is broken. As the spell wears off, the animals are really mystified and amazed that Edmund really did turn out to be a little boy. As Peepers tries to awaken him, Edmund wakes up in his own room to his mother's voice, having been knocked unconscious by a tree that had crashed into his bedroom. He realizes it's morning and the sun had come out to save the farm from destruction. His mother suspects he's had a dream, but Edmund is convinced it was real. After she leaves, Edmund, whose faith was restored in the characters, is now allowed to visit and watch as Chanticleer sings to raise the sun. As he is transported, all of his animal friends are happy to see him alive, well and human again.

Cast

• Glen Campbell as Chanticleer, a rooster who lives on a farm with many other animals, who are fond of and love him. When the sun rises without his crowing, his friends, believing he was lying to them about how his crowing brought up the sun (a fact he himself thought was true), leave him, leading to the adventures of Edmund and the others. In a miserable state he goes to the city and becomes a popular singer. Through his manager Pinkie, he meets Goldie and falls in love. Soon though, his friends come to the city and apologize. He and Goldie are than brought back to the farm, so he can save it. He is also based on the superstar Elvis Presley.

• Toby Scott Ganger as Edmund, the son of a human farmer. He transforms into a kitten by the Grand Duke as punishment and is the one who organizes the farm animals to bring Chanticleer back to the farm after the flood started. He slowly begins to learn the errors of his ways and he stops being afraid.

• Phil Harris as Patou, a Basset Hound who's a good friend to both Chanticleer and Edmund and plays the narrator character of the story. He despises the Grand Duke and is dedicated to Edmund's cause to bring Chanticleer back home. He is brave and reasonable, but somewhat temperamental. His endeavour to find Chanticleer is hampered by the fact that he does not know how to tie his shoes (which he wears because of bunions). However, in the end, he finally figures out how to tie them right. This is Harris's last and final role before his retirement from acting and his death in 1995.

• Eddie Deezen as Snipes, a magpie. He, Edmund, Patou and Peepers travel to the city in a toybox floating on the floodwaters, with Snipes more interested in exploring the city and its sights than actually helping his friends. Being claustrophobic, this poses a problem when he pokes holes in the box trying to escape and reach open air. He hates garbage and dirt, but loves the food served in the city when they go inside a restaurant where Chanticleer sings, particularly lasagna.

• Sandy Duncan as Peepers, a mouse. Because of this, she is initially terrified of Edmund, but he tries to convince everyone that he used to be a boy. She was willing to forgive him for being a cat if he took her and the others to the city. It is not until the very end of the movie that she believes him and comments "He was a little boy.... oh, he was a handsome little boy…." She has a lisp and very round glasses and is constantly arguing with Snipe's chauvinistic views.

• Christopher Plummer as the Grand Duke of Owls, a magical owl who despises Chanticleer. He overhears Edmund's call for Chanticleer in the real world and transforms him into a kitten as punishment, planning to eat him. The Duke hates his nephew and threatens several times to kill him if he fails. The Duke is a malevolent powerful creature of the night with a penchant for eating smaller animals as meals and commanding other villainous owls to do his bidding. He hates sunlight, like all owls, and recoils when light shines on him. Also, he possesses magical breath that can transform anyone into any creature as exampled when he turns Edmund into his kitten form.

• Charles Nelson Reilly as Hunch, the Grand Duke's pygmy owl nephew and lead henchman. Hunch enjoys rhyming words with "aggravation" and humming "The Ride of the Valkyries". He is dimwitted, but extremely aggressive. He carries an all-purpose Swiss Army Knife in a lidless soda can strapped to his back and uses its various bladed objects, tools and household objects (like a flyswatter) as weapons. A small running gag in the movie was that whenever the Duke would breathe on him, his magic would transform Hunch into a randomly different creature.

• Sorrell Booke as Pinky, an obese fox who favors golf. He is also Chanticleer's manager in the city. His job is to ensure that Chanticleer never feels the compulsion to return home by convincing him that his friends hate him, making it easy to profit off of Chanticleer's singing skills. He secretly works for the Grand Duke of Owls. This is Booke's last and final role before his retirement from acting, and his death in 1994.

• Ellen Greene as Goldie, a pheasant and singer also in Pinky's employment. She initially dislikes Chanticleer for stealing her spotlight, but falls in love with him upon becoming more acquainted with him.

• Will Ryan as Stuey, a chronically nervous pig.

Production

Plans for an animated version of the Chanticleer tale dated as far back as the early years of the Walt Disney Studios, where several of its artists were interested in combining elements of the story with those about an anthropomorphic fox named Reynard. Though character designs by Marc Davis survive, Walt Disney personally rejected the pitch, and the film was never put into production or animation tests. In the late 1980s, as a response to the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the proposal was revised by a former Disney animator, Don Bluth, who wanted to tell the rooster's story through live action and animation. Originally, the story's first and last scenes were to be shot in black and white, similar to 1939's The Wizard of Oz. The film's opening, which took place at a farm, had Edmond's mother reading the tale of Chanticleer to him. Victor French from Get Smart was set to direct these scenes, but terminal lung cancer forced him out of production. Bluth, who had never done anything in this field, took over from this point. However, very little of this footage made it in the final cut.

However, the live action footage was filmed at MGM Studios in Hollywood, California, USA. When the live action footage was finished during the production, Goldcrest Films recruited Sullivan Bluth Studios. to animate the rest of the film. Sullivan Bluth Studios was animated in Burbank, Califonia and Ireland. Chanticleer's girlfriend, Goldie the Pheasant, was designed to have attributes similar to Roger Rabbit's girlfriend, Jessica Rabbit (as seen in the original trailer). Reactions from mothers during test screenings of her scenes made Sullivan Bluth, at the insistence of their investor Goldcrest Films, cover her chest with feathers as cel overlays, or simply paint her cleavage out.

To avoid a potential PG rating, Bluth edited out the showing of the Duke's "skunk pie" (the pie is not seen in full view in the final version), the animators had to replace Chanticleer's glass of wine with a transparent cup of soda in the "Kiss and Coo" sequence, and had to draw colored effects into the Grand Duke's breath to make him less scary for young audiences. Test audiences also felt confused by the storytelling so the filmmakers decided to include narration told by the dog character, Patou, voiced by Phil Harris. The crew, because of these changes, had to work overtime to finish the film by Thanksgiving 1990.

Rock-a-Doodle was originally going to be released by MGM-Pathe, but studio partnership was facing financial difficulties, so Bluth rescheduled Rock-a-Doodle for a release on Christmas Day 1991 and selected The Samuel Goldwyn Company as the film's distributor. However, that date was further moved to April 1992 to avoid competition with Walt Disney Pictures and Walt Disney Feature Animation's Beauty and the Beast, and in another order to avoid competition with Universal Animation Studios and Amblin Entertainment's Fievel Goes West, This film is a sequel to An American Tail, in which Mr. Bluth was not involved.

Rock-a-Doodle was the first feature-length family live-action/animated film since 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but unlike the live-action characters from that film sharing the screen with Roger Rabbit, Edmond is the only live-action character to share the screen with the animated characters; this was at the beginning, where the Grand Duke would have to answer Edmond before being turned into an animated cat, and at the end, where Chanticleer is singing a reprise of "Sun Do Shine" like he does at the beginning. Don Bluth chose this direction because he was influenced by Roger Rabbit.

Aspect ratio

The live-action and animation sequences were filmed in two separate aspect ratios. The animation was shot on an open-matte fullscreen negative, meaning the top and bottom of the image was cropped in order to fit the theater screen. However the live-action scenes, including all animated elements, were shot in hard-matted widescreen. When the film is viewed in fullscreen, all the animated sequences (except for parts of the finale) can be seen in full, but the live-action segments lose information on the sides.

Soundtrack

The original songs were written and produced by T.J. Kuenster.

1. "Sun Do Shine" - Glen Campbell
2. "We Hate the Sun" - Christopher Plummer
3. "Come Back to You" - Glen Campbell
4. "Rock-a-Doodle" - Glen Campbell
5. "Bouncers Theme Song" - The Don Bluth Players
6. "Tweedle Te Dee" - Christopher Plummer
7. "Treasure Hunting Fever" - Glen Campbell
8. "Sink or Swim" - Ellen Greene
9. "Kiss 'n Coo" - Glen Campbell and Ellen Greene
10. "Back to the Country" - Glen Campbell
11. "The Owls' Picnic" - Christopher Plummer
12. "Tyin' Your Shoes" - Phil Harris
13. "Sun Do Shine" (Reprise) - Glen Campbell

The background vocals on "Sun Do Shine," "Come Back to You," "Rock-a-Doodle," "Treasure Hunting Fever," "Sink or Swim," "Kiss 'n Coo," "Back to the Country," and "Tyin' Your Shoes" were sung by The Jordanaires, who were also known for backing up Elvis himself. The background vocals on "We Hate the Sun," "Tweedle Te Dee," and "The Owls' Picnic" were all sung by a triple-tracked T.J. Kuenster.

Reception

Rock-a-Doodle received generally negative reviews from film critics. As of September 1, 2012, the film has a Rotten Tomatoes "rotten" rating of 25%.

The staff of Halliwell's Film Guide commended its "excellent animation", but complained of the "poor and confusing narrative" that "rendered [it] pointless".

Its $11.6 million take at the U.S. box office forced Don Bluth's studio into liquidation half a year after its release. Moreover, a Hong Kong company, Media Assets, purchased Bluth's next three films, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park and The Pebble and the Penguin. None of these did any better than Rock-a-Doodle, commercially or critically. All of them preceded 1997's Anastasia, his comeback hit.

A book adaptation of the film, by Don Bluth and Chip Lovitt, was published by Troll Communications LLC (ISBN 0-8167-2475-X).

Video release history

Rock-a-Doodle was first released on VHS and Laserdisc on August 18, 1992, as well as on DVD on July 20, 1999 by HBO Video. A second edition was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on November 8, 2005. In 2010, the film was released along with The Pebble and the Penguin as a double-sided DVD. The film is also currently available for instant streaming on Netflix.

See also

• List of animated feature-length films

Sources

• Hill, Jim (2000). "The "Chanticleer" Saga - Part Three". {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

External links

• Rock-a-Doodle at IMDb
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• Rock-a-Doodle at Box Office Mojo
• Rock-a-Doodle at Rotten Tomatoes