What if Walt Disney had produced the Looney Tunes franchise?/Walt Disney Animated Classics/Rock-a-Doodle

Rock-a-Doodle is a 1991 live action/animated comedy film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation for Walt Disney Pictures, directed by Don Bluth and written by David N. Weiss. The 49th Disney animated feature film, the film is loosely based on Edmond Rostand's comedy Chantecler. The film features the voices of Glen Campbell, Christopher Plummer, Phil Harris (in his final role before his retirement and death), Charles Nelson Reilly, Sorrell Booke, Sandy Duncan, Eddie Deezen, Ellen Greene and Toby Scott Ganger in his film debut. The film was released in the United Kingdom on 2 August 1991, and in the United States on 3 April 1992.

The film takes place in the 1950s, where an anthropomorphic rooster named Chantecler (whose special crow literally causes the sun to rise every morning) left the farm to become a rock star in the city. Without him, rain continues to pour non-stop, causing a massive flood all over the country. The evil Grand Duke of Owls and his birds-of-prey henchmen take over in the darkness. Chanticleer's barnyard friends, along with Edmond, a young human boy who had been transformed into a kitten by the Duke, take off on a mission to get Chanticleer to bring back the sun and save the country.

Rock-a-Doodle received mixed reviews from critics, but was a box-office success.

Plot
Chanticleer is a rooster, whose job is to wake the sun up every morning, but Nero, an old, but grumpy ragdoll-breed cat, who was a mouser years ago, was sick and tired of Chanticleer waking him up time and time again. So, rather than leave the farm, He decided to anonymously recruit another rooster to take Chanticleer’s place. After the other rooster fought against Chanticleer, Chanticleer sees the sun comes up on its own without his crow. Believing the other farm animals could be disappointed of him as a result, Chanticleer has no choice but to leave the farm to find work in the city, despite the other animals pleas. When Chanticleer’s replacement crows but in a quiet volume, so that he won’t wake Nero, the sun goes back down, after a minute. The replacement, realizing that only Chanticleer can raise the sun, makes a run for it as the farm animals chase him off. Nero, who realized what he had done, decided to go after Chanticleer to apologize, but is cut off by the Great Duke of Owls, a wicked owl who hates sunshine, holding a little kitten in his hand, said, "If you try to bring back that bird or if you tell everyone about me, this little runt will pay for your disobedience". Nero, knowing full well that he doesn’t want one of his kind hurt, made the Duke promise that he won’t hurt the kitten. The Duke agreed, and then glared at Nero. Afterwards, perpetual darkness and rainfall threaten the farm with flooding.

Turning out to be a story read to a 8-years-old boy named Edmond, it seems that the flooding has found his family, and when his mother goes to help them stop it, he calls out to Chanticleer. Then a lightning bolt strikes near Edmond, knocking him out. Moments later, as Edmond was waking up, he sees the Grand Duke of Owls, who takes a dislike to Edmond's attempts to foil his plans. He turns him into a kitten to devour him, but he is saved at the last second by Patou, a bloodhound who struggles to learn on how to tie the knots on his shoes, from Chanticleer's farm. He is accompanied by Snipes, a claustrophobic magpie and Peepers, an intellectual field mouse, as well as several animals from the farm, hoping to find Chanticleer, so he can wake the sun up. Edmond accompanies Patou, Snipes and Peepers to the city, while the rest of the animals remain at Edmond's house. En route, they are attacked by Hunch, the Duke's diminutive nephew, assigned by him to stop Edmond and the others from finding Chanticleer. They narrowly escape and enter the city.

Chanticleer has risen to fame in the city, thanks to his manager Pinky Fox, employed by the Duke to keep the rooster in the city. At a show featuring an Elvis Presley-type theme, he is introduced to Goldie Pheasant as a distraction in case Chanticleer's friends come to find him. Goldie soon grows genuinely attracted to Chanticleer, and realizes Pinky's true intentions when he captures Edmond and the others trying to get a letter to Chanticleer.

Meanwhile, the Duke and his party stalk the farm animals at Edmond's house, who continually use a flashlight to drive them off as long as the batteries hold out. Realizing that she is in love with him, Goldie confesses to Chanticleer that his friends had come to see him, and Pinky blackmails Chanticleer to attend his show or never see his friends again. Edmond and the others, being locked in a big box, try to escape with little success, as the barge gets closer and Nero, still under the spell of the Duke, tries to push the box containing the captives to the ocean, with so much difficulty. As Nero gets the box closer to the ocean, the captives try to get through to Nero. When Edmond said Nero that he doesn't have to be the villain, Nero starts to hesitate, and becomes free of the spell. Nero then goes to search for something to free the captives, and since he couldn't get enough time to locate a key to open the lock, he uses a rusted pipe to smash the lock. The group help Chanticleer and Goldie make a grand escape in a helicopter, foiling Pinky's plans and destroying his Cadillac at the same time. They return to the farm.

Back at the farm, the batteries go out and the Duke, along with his owl henchmen, captures the farm denizens and put them inside an oven to be cooked, but before they had a chance to even cook them, Edmond's group in the helicopter come to the rescue, holding off the owls, however, Hunch infiltrates the helicopter, clumsily sabotages the helicopter, causing it to sink in the lake. In the final showdown, Nero tries to fight off the Duke, for trying to use him to eliminate a fellow cat, as Edmond's group try to restore Chanticleer's spirit. the Duke then has his henchmen restrain the group away from Chanticleer. Edmond, refusing to let the owls have their way, bites one owl's arm, and tells the others to encourage Chanticleer. The Duke then uses his magic to strangle Edmond near the point of death. Nero, who saw this, tells the others to not let Edmond's sacrifice go in vain. and chant Chanticleer's name, angering the Duke to the point of turning into a tornado, as his own henchmen are caught inside. Chanticleer, after a few moments, finally breaks free of his depression, and crows for the sun to rise. As a strong sunbeam hits the Duke, he soon spins backwards and the sun rises, driving the Duke's minions away and shrinking him to a very minuscule size. Hunch barely recognizes his uncle, but uses this to exact revenge by chasing him with a fly swatter.

Edmond transforms back into his human form in front of the others, who realize he was telling the truth about being a little boy. As Peepers tries to wake him, he does so in his own room, with his mother watching over him after an accident where a tree collapsed into his room. The sun is shining outside and the floods have ended. When Edmound asks his mother about Chanticleer, she tells him his adventure was just a dream and he is told to get his rest. He picks up Chanticleer's book and thanks him for coming back, before he is magically transported into Chanticleer's world, where he witnesses the rooster singing to make the sun shine.

Development
After both the financial and critical successes of his first full-length animated features Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney was always on the lookout for new material that his animators could adapt for the screen. In 1943, after Chantecler was brought to his attention, Walt told storymen Ted Sears and Al Perkins to see what they could do with the material. However, after they reported to him that they were in difficulties because they were unsure how to make a sympathetic character out of the titular rooster, Walt combined the project with that of Reynard the Fox, another story animators were working on adapting at the time. This was because he thought that having a villain-in this case a fox to oppose Chanticleer would help audiences sympathize with him. However, as with many of the studio's other feature films currently in development at the time, the project had to be shelved for the duration of WWII.

After they had both finished their work on One Hundred and One Dalmatians, animators Marc Davis and Ken Anderson decided to collaborate in order to create a film in the wake of Broadway musicals. Going down to the Animation Archive Library, they both came across the Chantecler concept art and liked what they saw. When Walt heard that they were going to pick up on the project, he advised them to scrap all previously attempted work and start fresh, hoping that they could get it done in this way. Although, Marc and Ken worked very hard for the next few months, creating lots of concept art, the other animators were more interested in Chuck Jones' Gay Purr-ee and Bill Peet's The Sword in the Stone because they also had the doubt that a rooster would be able to be sympathetic. On the other hand, the board of the studio, headed by Roy Disney was trying to convince Walt to halt production on animated features entirely so that he could put his finances toward his two theme parks. Though he would not agree to the former proposal, Walt did decide that two of the three projects currently in development at the studio would have to be shelved. The reason why Gay Purr-ee and The Sword in the Stone were kept over Chantecler was because it was cheaper to animate humans than it was animals.

In the late 1980s, as a response to the success of the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the proposal was revised by Disney veteran animator, Don Bluth, who wanted to tell the rooster's story through live action and animation. Bluth personally approached Walt and inquired about reviving Chantecler as an live-action/animated film with a new title: Rock-a-Doodle. Knowing he could trust Bluth thanks to the financial and critical success of An American Tale and The Land Before Time, Walt relented and production had begun. Furthermore, the character Reynard, the fox who was intended to be the film's villain during the production in the 1940s and the 1960s, who was intended to be voiced by Tim Curry when Rock-a-Doodle begun production, was removed from the story and replaced with an newly-created character, the Grand Duke of Owls.

Originally, the story's first and last scenes were to be shot in black and white, similar to MGM's The Wizard of Oz. The film's opening, which took place at a farm, had Edmond's mother reading the tale of Chanticleer to him. Victor French from Get Smart and Highway to Heaven was set to direct these scenes, but terminal lung cancer forced him out of production. Bluth, who had never done anything in this field, took over from this point. However, very little of this footage made it in the final cut.

To avoid a potential PG rating, Disney edited out the showing of the Duke's "skunk pie" (the pie is not seen in full view in the final version), the animators had to replace Chanticleer's glass of wine with a transparent cup of soda in the "Kiss and Coo" sequence and had to draw colored effects into the Grand Duke's breath to make him less scary for young audiences. Test audiences also felt confused by the storytelling so the filmmakers decided to include narration told by the dog character, Patou, voiced by Phil Harris. The crew, because of these changes, had to work overtime to finish the film by Thanksgiving 1990.