‘Chicken for Linda!’ Review: A Touching Coming-of-Age Cartoon Caper Made With the Finest Ingredients

A throwback, of sorts, to the kinds of animated kids flicks that existed before the advent of Pixar and CGI, Chicken for Linda! (Linda veut du poulet !) is a lovingly hand-drawn ode to the whims and wills of capricious children: specifically, one very stubborn little French girl who won’t take no for an answer when it comes to her favorite meal.

This new collaboration from directors Chiara Malta (Simple Women) and Sébastien Laudenbach (The Girl Without Hands) is a simple and even silly story on the surface, following an action-packed day in the life of its titular heroine as she tries to get her mom to cook a family poultry recipe for dinner. But as the plot — or is that the sauce? — thickens, the film begins to probe deeper, exploring how kids and adults can be affected by the death of a loved one, and how they can eventually try to move on.

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What feels fresh yet familiar about Chicken for Linda! is its use of an old-school animation aesthetic, combining 2D drawings and monochrome watercolor schemes to tell a story set in the modern-day French banlieue. Typically, screen depictions of the housing blocks outside Paris and other major cities tend to be rather grim tales of urban desolation (think Dheepan or Les Misérables), but Malta and Laudenbach opt for something more playful and uplifting, creating a whimsical caper plot where the kids in the neighborhood run rampant and the place devolves into joyous anarchy.

It all starts when 8-year-old Linda (Mélinée Leclerc) gets unfairly punished by her mother, Paulette (Clotilde Hesme), a widow still suffering from the sudden and tragic death of her Italian husband, Giulio (Pietro Sermonti). In order to pay Linda back, Paulette promises to cook her chicken with peppers — a dish that was Giulio’s specialty before his demise, and thus carries the taste of trauma for mother and daughter alike.

The day of the chosen meal is also one of a general strike — welcome to France! — where all the stores and supermarkets are closed, forcing Paulette to resort to extreme measures in order to grant Linda her wish. She steals a chicken from a local farm, gets chased down by a totally incompetent cop (Esteban), meets a truck driver (Patrick Pineau) who has the hots for her, then tries and fails to slaughter the hen herself. Meanwhile, Linda’s buddies from the hood attempt to procure a chicken on their own, unaware they may wind up burning their whole building down in the process.

The film is packed with lots of gags yet takes its time to explore Linda and Paulette’s mutual sadness in the wake of Giulio’s death, while also introducing a cast of lively characters who belong to the working-class milieu they all stem from. If some of the jokes can be broad and childish (the film probably plays best for the 10-and-under set), the overall tone is so tender that you can’t help but be moved by Linda’s nonstop adventures. In the end, her obstinacy winds up paying off, allowing her to come to terms with her father’s loss while having a grand ole time time with her pals.

Although Chicken for Linda! is grounded in the real world, whether it’s the chaos of a French strike day or the conditions of a housing project in desperate need of repair, it takes plenty of flights of fancy as well. A handful of musical numbers recall the poetic fantasy of Jacques Demy’s classic Donkey Skin — another great kids’ flick that dealt with heavy issues in a somewhat light fashion. The songs were composed by Clément Ducol and, like the rest of the action, they’re accompanied by evocative line drawings that recall children’s books and movies of a pre-digital age, when much more was left to the imagination of the target audience.