Due to Edmond's lisp, his line "Jeepers! I'm all furry!" sounds more like "I'm a furry!", a misquote that has become a meme long after the film's release.
Best line ever when taken out of context: "And now I'm licking myself!"
When Hunch breaks into Pinky's aircraft while the good guys are trying to escape, he jumps down from the aircraft's entrance, hangs from a rope and, for a brief second, stares at Goldie's breasts before she slaps him away. Made funnier with Charles Nelson Reilly's signature "Hur hrrrmmm" laugh (and even funnier when one realizes that Reilly was gay).
When Goldie sullenly complains that she's too good to be just a chorus girl, Pinky snidely suggests that she could "give up show biz." Whether she's appalled at the general idea or at the, ah, other implications of that suggestion, well...
In fact, after Pinky makes that suggestion, Goldie falls to her knees and covers her chest, gasping "Pinky!" with a scandalized expression.
Some of the lyrics to the song Rock-a-Doodle, such as "Well, it ain't right to rock alone. It takes two, I do believe. I wanna rock-a-doodle doodle to you (To you). Like you rock-a-doodle doodle to me." Is Chanticleer singing about dancing or...?
While The Grand Duke was a tornado, a book flies around and on one of the pages, there is a message that says “Chapter 17, Chocolate Bunnies from He**.
The second time the Duke morphs Hunch with his evil breath, after having accidentally sent the heroes down an aqueduct pipe, the shape of his oblong-shaped head has a......rather unfortunate design. Especially if you view it from the back.
This movie is very loosely based on a little-known play called Chanticler written by Edmond Rostand. In the play, a rooster named Chanticler is the protagonist, the Goldie character is a non-anthropomorphic pheasant, Edmund and the magical elements are completely absent, and both Patou and the Grand Duke of Owls appear (although both have significantly smaller roles than they do in the movie). Most significantly, Chanticler's crowing does not make the sun rise, and he accepts that.
The play, in turn, was based on Chaucer's "The Nun's Priest's Tale," which in turn was based on a popular medieval fable about a rooster named Chanticleer and his run-in with a fox (usually Renard). In that one, Chanticleer really was The Ace, really did think his crowing brought up the sun, and when he was kidnapped by the fox the farm really did mourn his loss.
Alas, Poor Scrappy: As unpopular as Edmund is with some viewers, it's hard not to feel sad when he gets strangled almost to death by the Grand Duke of Owls, seeing the action as his definitive Moral Event Horizon.
Animation Age Ghetto: Although Siskel & Ebert mostly pointed out the flawed plot, they both griped about the amount of violence and darkness in the film, saying that violence does not belong in a children's film. One has to wonder what made them think this was strictly a children's film. Maybe because it's animated. They made the same complaints for most of Don Bluth's previous films as well. Incidentally, this is actually one of the least dark of Bluth's films.
Some dialogue suggests that the Grand Duke is actually secretly envious of Chanticleer and wants to undermine him out of jealous spite. Noticeably, his first and last words before being shrunken down and begging for mercy from Hunch was both an irritation to being compared to Chanticleer. His actions in driving Chanticleer away from the farm beyond removing a threat to his hunting and dislike of the rooster's singing, also had implications of degrading him to make himself feel better- a symptom of schadenfreude, something that especially envious people tend to feel when a more successful person is brought down and undergoes a Villainous Breakdown when people still cheer for him, regardless of this humiliation. He has a habit of turning victims into smaller, degrading forms, hunt down the smaller animals or bolstering his size to make him more intimidating, Something that implies an immense inferiority complex.
Where exactly was Peepers able to find and commandeer Pinky's helicopter after her close call in Pinky's trailer?
Chanticleer's crowing somehow being able to shrink down the Grand Duke to smaller than a mouse with no prior foreshadowing, since there was no indication that sunlight could do that.
Audience-Alienating Era: After a long string of financial successes and runaway hits through the eighties, this film proved to be the start of one for Don Bluth, not helped by its baffling premise or its part in killing the studio of which he was the head at the time.
Audience-Alienating Premise: Nothing says "box office smash hit" like "animated musical adapted from an obscure French play, featuring an Elvis impersonator chicken, and directed by Don Bluth." Because seriously, nothing says that. Although considerably less trippy and dark than some of Bluth's earlier work, it was still too dark and weird for many non-fans and preview audiences, while devoted Bluth fans considered the Lighter and Softer tone to be a betrayal of what made his style so unique, and the resulting film became his first to be savaged both critically and commercially.
In the Swedish dub there are the songs "Sun on Me" and "Rock-A-Doodle". Even the music playing over the end credits manages to somehow be both bittersweet and charming at the same time.
The Norwegian dub has all of Chanticleer's songs performed by the Vazelina Bilopphøggers; Viggo Sandvig belts it out while the others perform gorgeous backup melodies.
The Don Bluth staple. Especially weird is where Edmund apparently runs into his own brain after Peepers' Disney Death, to resolve a minor character flaw.
While most of the songs do actually serve the plot, there are a handful of very short and completely unnecessary ones. The most notorious of these would have to be the bouncer's song and the Duke's "They're Running Out of Batteries" song.
Catharsis Factor: For those who are not rooting for the Grand Duke to win, especially after he nearly kills Edmund. After ruining Chanticleer's life, tormenting the farm animals by either almost eating them or destroying their hopes whenever possible, being a monstrously abusive uncle to his nephew, and almost killing Edmund, a little boy for spiteful reasons, it's satisfying that Chanticleer inadvertently gives the Duke a taste of his own medicine by having him be reduced the same form of small, helpless creature he often used his powers to turn others into in order to eat them and being chased by Hunch to be either eaten or tormented as payback for his years of abuse- even if the entire end is Played for Laughs.
Cult Classic: Despite its flaws, it still has a small nostalgic fan following for being a decent children's film that tries to tell an interesting story.
The people who like this movie tend to like the Duke's hilariously psychotic nephew, Hunch. Let's be honest, though, did you really care about how this boy who got turned into a kitten was going to find this big rooster so he can bring up the sun again, or did you wonder why the nutty little owl is so desperate for his uncle's affection?
Goldie Pheasant is ridiculously popular with fans of the film; her popularity in the Furry Fandom certainly lends itself to this.
Genius Bonus: The Deleted Scene of the Grand Duke trying to cook a skunk in a pie makes sense when you realize that owls are one of the few predators of skunks due to lacking a sense of smell, and thus are unaffected by the skunk's notorious scent glands.
Harsher in Hindsight: The gag where Patou accidentally bashes Chanticleer on the head might be awkward for some people now, given how Glen Campbell developed and later died from Alzheimer's Disease.
Jerkass Woobie: Hunch, the Grand Duke's much-abused nephew, who in spite of his incompetence, tries everything to appease his Evil Uncle, who at best, sees him as a slightly more competent minion due to being related to him or at worst, emotionally, mentally and physically abuses him with threats of killing him or or changing him into degrading forms.
Moral Event Horizon: The Grand Duke of Owls has done a lot of nasty Kick the Dog moves throughout the film. However, he finally crossed it when he tries to kill Edmund by strangling him and even mocking him for his loss by laughing at his apparent demise.
Really scary owl designed to be a really intimidating villain pukes Lucky Charms. And his sidekick calls him "Uncle Dukie."
The owl henchmen. They sing amusingly stupid songs and one of them prances to the table with a picnic basket during their last song, the same owl and another owl show a psychotic look◊ during the same song, the second song they sing is about batteries and it's only about twenty seconds long, and if you pay close attention to them when Edmond shines the helicopter light on them, they cling to each other.
The bouncers' song. It's brief, corny, and little more relevant than the equally random batteries song.
We'll bounce, bounce, bounce you all over the place! Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce...
Chanticleer's Oh, Crap! reaction before he and Goldie crash the motorcycle into the trailer. The expression on his face looks rather silly, and the Big "NO!" he lets out sounds goofy. Almost on par with Darth Vader's.
Thanks to his hilarious Elmuh Fudd Syndwome, almost everything Edmond says is this, or just annoying depending on your opinion.
Nightmare Retardant: The fact that the Duke can be driven away by a flashlight makes him even less threatening.
The subplot surrounding Patou struggling to tie his shoes. It has no bearing on the plot whatsoever and serves as little more than a rather weak Running Gag.
One could easily make the argument that the live-action segments were unnecessary and simply convoluted the plot that much more for it.
So Bad, It's Good: The storyline and everything about it is utterly ridiculous, but it still has its share of fans who enjoy it for how ridiculous it is.
The sequences with the live-action Edmund in the animated world fall brutally short of the standards set by Who Framed Roger Rabbit just three years prior.
Superlative Dubbing: The Latin American Spanish dub improves the voice acting in many, many levels. Special mention to Edmund, who in this version doesn't suffer of the same problems with his voice, partly because his voice actress, Diana Santos, is a veteran voice actress with decades of experience voicing either cute little girls or boys and she does an outstanding job on voicing him.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Chanticleer. After the prologue sets him up to be the lead, he's promptly replaced by Edmund, despite the movie being an adaptation of a play that had him as the definitive main character. Hearing his side of the story would've been much more interesting.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A movie about a kid that gets transported into an Alternate Tooniverse, becoming one of them in the process and needing to go back home. That does sound interesting. The movie doesn't focus on that at all, the kid being human is pretty much forgotten about in the plot until the climax, and the focus is more on bringing a different character back.
This Is Your Premise on Drugs: It starts off relatively normal with a country singing rooster whose crow apparently brings up the sun on a frame, but is forced to leave in shame when this proved to be not the case in one instance and it's revealed to be a an animated interpretation of a story as a metaphor for the situation told by a mother to her son in live action while they deal with the storm happening outside. Then, it turns out that not only the Grand Duke of Owls is real and by extension the story, but also has magic breath that turns the boy into an animated kitten while somehow transporting him into the realm of the story, where this kitten now has to work with the farm animals to save the rooster who now has taken his Elvis Impersonator motif more literally - being a jaded rock singer working with a sleazy music executivethat is literally a plump fox in the city and the boy briefly has a Heroic BSoD that he enters into his own brain and sees images of the people that frighten him. This is just one of the several instances of insanity that the plot brings.
Took the Bad Film Seriously: Christopher Plummer gives his all-in to the Grand Duke as a Sissy Villain that bakes pies and does cross-stitch but wants to cause an apocalypse of eternal darkness. It easily makes him the best part of the film.
Tough Act to Follow: Compared to Don Bluth's previous films, the films following this afterward never became successful nor memorable as their predecessors. It also had to try to do this with Disney and Spielberg.
Let's not forget Chanticleer, who was laughed off the farm by his friends and family and abandoned his former life to find a new purpose in the city, where despite his incredible fame as a singer he is wracked with loneliness and depression. Then he finds out his employer is working against him and trying to keep him from reuniting with his friends, resulting in a harrowing journey to get back home where he is completely helpless to save it from the flooding. By the end, you will be crowing just as loudly as he does when he finds his true calling again.
The creative and lively Norwegian and Swedish dubs tend to improve character likeability, especially in the case of Edmund, a fair deal.
The Norwegian version featuring the popular band Vazelina Bilopphøggers and the Swedish version having The Boppers and The Jordanaires certainly helps; the music went from awkward and dorky to Awesome Music thanks to Viggo Sandvik's and Jerry Williams brassy vocals.
written by Edmond Rostand. In the play, a rooster named Chanticler is the protagonist, the Goldie character is a non-anthropomorphic pheasant, Edmund and the magical elements are completely absent, and both Patou and the Grand Duke of Owls appear (although both have significantly smaller roles than they do in the movie). Most significantly, Chanticler's crowing does not make the sun rise, and he accepts that.
