Chicken for Linda! (2023)

There's a moment watching Chicken for Linda! where you realise you've completely surrendered to it. No explosions, no pop soundtrack needle-drops, no celebrity voice cameos winking at the adults in the room. Just a mother, a daughter, a promise that got out of hand, and a scramble through the city to make it right. It's so unpretentious about what it is that it almost catches you off guard.

What strikes you first is how it looks. The animation here is hand-drawn in a loose, sketch-like style, with watercolour backgrounds and expressive linework that feels like someone's beloved notebook brought to life. The palette is soft and warm, nostalgic without being cloying. In an era where the default mode for kids' animation is polished CGI with that same glossy sheen you see everywhere, this feels genuinely radical in its modesty. It reminded me a little of what I enjoyed about Josep, another hand-drawn European animated film that trusted its visual instincts over spectacle. There's a warmth and an immediacy to drawn animation that computers still haven't quite replicated, and Chicken for Linda! wears it beautifully.

The story is small, deliberately so. A mum makes a mistake, feels the guilt of it, and tries to fix things by fulfilling a wish her daughter has been harbouring: eating chicken, the dish her late father used to make. What follows is a gentle comic scramble, a chain of minor chaos threading through the neighbourhood. The film is only 72 minutes long and it earns every one of them. There's no padding, no subplot crowbarred in to hit a feature-length runtime. It arrives, tells its story, and lets you go. I respect that enormously.

It's light, but I want to push back on anyone who'd dismiss it as slight. Light and shallow are not the same thing. The film understands grief and guilt and the strange pressure of a child's expectations in a way that's genuinely felt rather than manufactured. The emotional beats land quietly, without the swelling orchestral cues telling you how to feel. That restraint is actually quite difficult to pull off.

Where I have some reservations is in the depth of the emotional payoff. The film gestures at something bigger, the shadow of absence in a family, the weight a parent carries, and then steps back from it just as you expect it to go somewhere profound. I found myself wanting it to push a little harder, to let the feeling breathe for a moment longer. It's a genuine criticism, not a devastating one. The film chooses gentleness and mostly that's the right call, but occasionally it feels like it's pulling its punches.

There's also the question of audience. This is technically a children's film, but I suspect a lot of younger kids will find its pace too quiet and its concerns too adult. It's not dumbed down, which I admire. But the children who'll get the most from it are probably those who've already experienced some version of the emotional territory it maps. For adults coming to it fresh, there's real pleasure in the craft and the tone, even if the story doesn't quite deliver the catharsis it's building towards.

Three stars, then, and I mean that warmly. Chicken for Linda! is a modest film made with genuine love, and it wears that modesty like a badge rather than an apology. It won't rewrite what animation can do, and it doesn't try to. What it does is offer something rarer: a quiet, human story told with real visual care. It lingers the way a good meal does, not because it blew you away, but because it felt like exactly what you needed at the time. Sometimes that's more than enough.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2023  | Watched: 2026-04-21

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