Chicken for Linda! Review: Grief and Gravy in Primary Colours

Colour as character

The film’s most immediate pleasure is its palette: characters rendered as loose, hand-painted washes of a single bold colour, identities legible at a glance in yellow, red or blue. It is a daring formal choice that keeps the busy farce readable and gives the animation a spontaneous, almost improvised warmth — the look of a children’s drawing with the sophistication of an art film.

Farce with a fuse

The plot is a screwball engine — a mother, a promised chicken, a citywide strike, a runaway lorry — that escalates with cheerful absurdity. But the chaos is a container for grief: the whole misadventure is really a mother’s attempt to reconnect with a daughter mourning a dead father, and the film never loses sight of that ache beneath the mayhem.

Sound and motion

The animation moves with a musical looseness, and the film’s rhythms — a sudden song, a burst of slapstick, a quiet pause — are conducted with real confidence. At barely eighty minutes, it never outstays its welcome, trusting economy and energy over spectacle.

Sorrow underneath

What lingers is the tenderness. Beneath the primary colours and the runaway comedy is a precise, unsentimental portrait of a family learning to grieve together, and the film earns its final warmth honestly.

Verdict

Chicken for Linda! is a small, joyous surprise — formally bold, genuinely funny and quietly heartfelt. Proof that European animation remains a place of real invention.