‘Chicken for Linda!’ review: Don’t miss this gorgeously animated culinary quest

Chicken For Linda! is an immaculate snowball of a movie, as what begins as a young girl’s wish to eat a chicken dinner quickly spirals into an unexpected adventure.

Here, stolen poultry, pantless cops, and madcap chases through Paris await, along with some of 2024’s most unforgettable animation. Between pops of color and slapstick comedy, directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach craft a touching mother-daughter story about how even the simplest things can unearth long-buried memories — and all the emotions that come with them.

Chicken For Linda! understands how “small” stories can still have huge stakes.

Credit: GKIDS

As its title suggests, Chicken For Linda! (Linda veut du poulet! in the original French) is all about getting eight-year-old Linda (voiced by Mélinée Leclerc) some chicken. It’s her one wish when her mother Paulette (Clotilde Hesme) wants to make amends after an unfair punishment: She just wants to eat chicken with peppers, a dish her late father Giulio (voiced by Pietro Sermonti) used to make. All Paulette needs to do is secure the ingredients and cook the meal.

On the surface, Chicken For Linda!‘s premise seems fairly straightforward, even when you throw a general strike into the mix that makes it impossible for Paulette to go shopping. Yet Malta and Laudenbach add layer after layer of emotional depth to Paulette and Linda’s journey, to the point that even an everyday act like buying chicken becomes a quest surprisingly rooted in love and grief.

That emotional depth all starts with the film’s opening shot: A wedding ring ensconced in a green bubble twirls into view while Giulio delivers a voiceover about memory. The depths of our memory, he says, are like a black night, where forgotten moments wait to be rediscovered. Other colorful bubbles pop into view: memories of Paulette teaching baby Linda the names of each of her fingers, of Linda entranced by the shiny beauty of Paulette’s wedding ring, of Giulio serving chicken with peppers to his family. Suddenly, Giulio’s bubble shrinks, then disappears altogether. The other follow suit, until all we’re left with is a bubble of a crying baby Linda against a backdrop as black as night.

Years later, Paulette’s wedding ring becomes a point of contention between her and Linda, as she believes Linda has traded it at school for a new beret. Her anger at the loss prompts a hard slap and a punishing visit to Linda’s annoyed Aunt Astrid (voiced by Laetitia Dosch), but none of that compares to the guilt Paulette feels when she realizes she was wrong. (The family cat Gazza was the culprit all along!) Linda’s request for chicken and peppers becomes not just a way for her to connect with the father she barely remembers, but a way for Paulette to atone for the pain she caused her child as well. Even as Linda begins to lose herself in the joy of her and her mother’s hunt for chicken throughout Paris, Paulette remains dogged in her determination to cook this meal and salvage her relationship with her daughter.

Of course, the meal itself brings its own share of baggage with it. Chicken and peppers was the last meal Giulio ever cooked for Linda and Paulette, who now mostly cooks up microwave meals. In one heartbreaking scene, Paulette pores over Giulio’s recipe book — making sure to blow the dust off its cover first — and struggles to contain her emotions when she comes across the instructions she needs. It’s just one of many moments of empathy Chicken For Linda! has for Paulette, proving that even though Linda’s name is in the title, it’s just as much her mother’s story as it is hers.

Chicken For Linda! is nonstop fun.

Credit: GKIDS

With all these stakes in place, Malta and Laudenbach keep even Chicken For Linda!’s most absurd escapades rooted in Paulette’s attempts to reconnect with Linda, and in Linda’s hopes to reconnect with Giulio through her faint memory of the last meal they shared. If anything, these emotions make the film’s absurdity reach even higher comedic heights, a feat helped along even more by Chicken For Linda!‘s (literally) colorful ensemble.

Each of Chicken For Linda!‘s adult characters are a charming bundle of contradictions. Paulette berates Linda for being a thief, only to steal a chicken from a farm minutes later. Aunt Astrid is a yoga instructor who encourages her class to remain peaceful, even as she scarfs down candy to placate the unbridled rage she feels whenever Paulette asks her for something. Truck driver Jean-Michel (voiced by Patrick Pineau) becomes immediately smitten with Paulette after she and Linda stow away in his truck. He’s so smitten that he offers to help them prepare their chicken dinner — even though he’s allergic to chicken.

Rounding out the cast are Linda and her group of friends, whose childlike wonder in the face of this grand hunt for chicken and peppers marks a stark contrast from the mostly stressed adults. They’re a delightful bunch, especially since Chicken For Linda! allows them to be grubby and silly and even a tad morbid. I don’t know what made me laugh more: Children shaking down a car to hinder a police investigation, or Linda debating how best to kill a chicken. Sure, it’s dark, but it feels exactly like the kind of excitement a wild child would have when making chicken and peppers from scratch.

Chicken For Linda! is a hand-painted marvel.

Credit: GKIDS

Part of why the children in Chicken For Linda! are so much fun stems from the film’s animation, which places us in a childlike point of view thanks to its hand-painted, almost doodle-esque animation. Vibrant blocks of color build environments, light, and shadow, while each character gets a color of their own. Black lines trace out features on each character’s face and body, but Chicken For Linda! shuns over-detailing in favor of more impressionistic work. If you ever tire of Disney and Pixar’s recent CG work that strives for realism, one watch of Chicken For Linda! will remind you of the versatility of animation.

Chicken For Linda!‘s animation especially shines during the film’s musical sequences. These aren’t big song-and-dance numbers, but rather fantasies that bring us deep into characters’ minds. One near-lullaby details how hard it can be for parents to sleep, while an Astrid-centric song brings us on a candy-coated walk through the stars. Elsewhere, a key number smartly uses color blocking to evoke everything from spotlights to film projection, all in the service of examining memory.

Each song takes Chicken For Linda!‘s animated playfulness to the extreme, but the whole film is full of moments that reaffirm the power of 2D, hand-painted films. Take the memory bubbles that open the film. They’re a simple concept, but Chicken For Linda! executes them in a way that is at once visually engaging and impossibly moving. Really, they’re just a small-scale representation of the film’s overall goal: Taking a simple story about dinner and elevating it to delightful and unexpected places, more than earning that exclamation point at the end of its title along the way.

Chicken For Linda! opens in New York April 5, in Los Angeles April 12, and in select U.S. theaters starting April 15.