Chicken for Linda! (2024), by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach
As Guillermo del Toro said in his acceptance speech when he won the Oscar for Best Animation with his “Pinocchio”, animation is not a genre aimed only for children, it’s another tool to tell stories. The same can be said about musicals: song and dance are tools to tell stories, too! When those two are together, the results can be amazing: musical animated movies — being the Disney ones the most famous — can enchant and amuse people from all ages and tell great stories. This is the case with the French flick “Chicken for Linda!”
Linda is a young girl fascinated by her mother Paulette’s ring, a gift the mom has received from her deceased husband, Giulio, an Italian gentleman. One night, at her aunt Astrid’s as a punishment because Paulette believed Linda had lost the beloved ring, the little girl confesses she has only one wish: to eat chicken with peppers. But this isn’t possible for a personal reason: this was the dish the family was tasting when Giulio fell ill and died. Roman-style chicken with pepper was the last meal Giulio prepared for his family.
Making the recipe is made harder because of a general strike. Suddenly there’s nowhere to buy a chicken because all butchers are supporting the strike! And, once a chicken is obtained, Paulette realizes she knows no one who could kill the animal for her to cook it. Now Linda will need the help of her friends, neighbors and even strangers to fulfill her wish to eat chicken with peppers. This whole strike imbroglio makes the chicken be the MacGuffin in the film, that is, the element that fuels the plot.
In a colorful world, each character has its own unique color for clothes and skin. Linda is yellow, her mother, orange, their cat, purple, Linda’s best friend Annette is lilac, the same color as their teacher. Another friend, Carmen, is dark green, while her little brother Pablo is light green. This phenomenon is easily explained: the people and other beings are of their favorite color! And in the dark the effect is even more interesting, as people and beings are contoured in their favorite colors, the rest of the environment being black.
The songs are charming but not very catchy. Astrid’s song about eating candy when she’s upset seems misplaced, and is accompanied by graphics that look like they came out of a fever dream. That being said, the best song — out of three — is Giulio’s one about Heaven. All the songs were composed and sung by Clément Ducel, who had worked in the hit movie “Annette”, by Leos Carax.
Linda isn’t a very polite child. She’s rude to her mother, naughty to her aunt, and even defies the police. Another feisty person in her family is aunt Astrid (voiced by Laetitia Dosch) and her attitudes make her the closest of an antagonist that the film has — alongside the police officer who tries to stop Linda and Paulette, Serge. If not for the great rapport between Astrid and Serge, it could be said that “Chicken for Linda!” corroborates with the “cops are bastards” movement.
Defined as “an ode to freedom, to revolution, to disorder, even to anarchy”, this animated feature reminded me of another anarchic French film with a mischievous young girl as the lead: “Zazie in the Metro” (1960), by the master Louis Malle. Another thing shared by the two movies is that there is in both a strike that is an important plot point.
“Chicken for Linda!” is the first feature directed by Chiara Malta, an award-winning filmmaker with some successful shorts under her belt and an ongoing job on television shows both in France and abroad. Co-director Sébastien Laudenbach also enjoys success with his illustrations and short films, but this isn’t his first foray into animated features: he directed the much-awarded “The Girl Without Hands” (2016).
Defined in the synopsis as “a story that is an intoxicating blend of slapstick comedy, musical, and family drama”, “Chicken for Linda!” has all the ingredients to please both children and adults in pleasant 76 minutes.
