Chicken for Linda!’s animation needs a big screen and emotional processing space

05.04.2024 - 17:35 / polygon.com / Space

From an initial read of the title, I was under the impression that Chicken for Linda! was about a little girl who really wanted a pet chicken. I was wrong. The French animated movie from directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach takes place in modern France and follows a little girl named Linda who really wants to eat chicken. Specifically chicken with peppers. For Linda’s mom, Paulette, who mostly serves up frozen meals and doesn’t really cook at all, making this dish is already a challenge.

And thanks to an ongoing general strike in their town, all the grocery shops are closed, which makes this quest even harder. But Paulette feels really guilty about wrongfully punishing Linda for swiping a treasured ring, so she heads to a farm to buy a live chicken. This begins Linda and Paulette’s daunting quest to kill, cook, and eat this chicken, something neither of them has even fathomed doing before.

It’s much less morbid than it sounds. Actually, it’s unexpectedly funny, while also being a bittersweet reflection on grief and memory.

Linda approaches her mission with bright-eyed determination that softens the hearts of authority figures and convinces an assortment of inexperienced people to take a stab at killing and preparing the chicken. Eventually, we learn just why Linda is fixated on this particular chicken-and-peppers meal: It’s something her late father, who she barely remembers, used to cook.

All the characters in the movie come to life in single-color blocks, rendered with distinct outlines. There’s a lovely tangibility to how they move: The cat operates as one big blob, except when it stretches out its paws. The policeman wriggles his long limbs around a drooping telephone cord. From a distance, the chickens are splashes of color and a curling outline, darting across the screen. Against the painted background, each frame is vibrant and dynamic.

Chicken for Linda! is chock-full of hijinks, with a lot of physical humor and hilarious situations that stem from the absurd nature of the plot. A cop pulls a gun on the chicken, since that’s the only way he knows how to possibly kill it. After stealing the chicken, Linda and her mom leap into the back of a vegetable delivery truck and hide out among crates of watermelons. There are moments when the movie lags, long chase scenes that get a little too abstract, and a handful of musical sequences that feel like they’re from another movie entirely. But even among the shenanigans and the loftier animated sequences, the movie is anchored in Linda and her desire for the coveted meal, her desire to connect with her father.

That family dynamic, the element that gives this otherwise lightheartedmovie its weight, isn’t saved for an emotional gut punch at