But to say that the amazing legacy of Pixar would be a tough act to follow would be a gross understatement. And that’s exactly the challenge that faced the in-house animators of Chicken Little, Disney’s very first full-length computer-animated production. "We do have to measure up with Pixar, if not exceed the work that they did for Disney," says Jerry Ching, one of Chicken Little’s animators who also happens to be a Filipino. "And to tell you frankly, it’s not easy at all, at least not during the first try."

It’s not that Jerry is not up to the task—far from it. A Fine Arts undergrad from UP, Jerry got his first involvement with animation for the children’s TV show, Batibot. Since his migration to the US, Jerry has since finished a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Character Animation at the California Institute of Arts, a school that the late Walt Disney himself had funded. He has worked on animated feature films for the last 13 years, beginning with Casper for George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic and, since 1995, with such Disney animated blockbusters as The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Mulan, Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove and the dazzling Fantasia 2000.

But all of his previous projects for Disney involve 2D animation so the transition to 3D is not as easy as he originally thought. But Jerry admits that it’s also a lot of fun as he recalls the scenes in Chicken Little that he helped work on, like the ones involving Chicken Little and his Dad and Hollywood Abby, a character that, near the end of the movie, is nowhere near the ugly duckling that the real Abby really is for much of the film.

"In the movie, there’s this Hollywood studio who decided to make a movie based on the life of Chicken Little and all of the actors bore no resemblance to their real-life counterparts," says Jerry, speaking in Tagalog over the phone. "As the lead animator for Hollywood Abby, I made her a lot sexier than she should be."

When asked to name his favorite scenes from the movie where his own "personal touch" is very much evident, Jerry points to the baseball sequence where Chicken Little was running and sliding. In that sequence, there’s also a scene where he is about to bat, Chicken Little says to his father in a thought balloon, "I won’t let you down, Dad" before hitting the ball almost out of the park.

"Another one of the scenes that I worked on was during the time when everyone was panicking and running away from the aliens," he beams. "I thought all of us who worked on that sequence did really good at it."

A recent box-office hit, Chicken Little has been met with mixed reviews and unfairly compared to the Pixar blockbusters. But most of the criticism was leveled at its script, which stretches the original story of Chicken Little beyond his infamous boy-who-cried-wolf-like last words, "The sky is falling." When it comes to the quality of Disney’s own 3D animation, everyone is pretty much unanimous in saying that life without Pixar is going to be a rosy one for Mickey Mouse.

In that respect, Chicken Little can still be considered an auspicious debut for Disney and it would be safe to say at this point that the studio is not going to knock on Steve Jobs’s door anytime soon. As a matter of fact, Jerry and his fellow in-house animators are already working on their next computer animation project, Meet The Robinsons.

Describing it as "something like Dexter’s Laboratory meets Back To The Future," "Meet The Robinsons is about a boy genius who wants to invent a machine that recovers forgotten memories so he’ll know why his mother left him," he narrates. "But what happens instead is that he went forward in time and encountered a strange family. I can’t say more than that but I can assure you that it’s a very exciting project for me."

Jerry, who lives in Burbank ("just five minutes from work") with his wife and two-year old son Zach, also told us that the upcoming DVD version is something to watch for as it includes many deleted scenes that he and his fellow animators worked very hard on.

I asked him what would be his dream computer-animation project. "It’s our very own, Ibong Adarna," he says without hesitation. "It’s a classic story that should translate well in computer animation. I know it’s a bit of wishful thinking on my part but I’d still like to see the day when I would actually get to work on this."