>>114692509I'd argue it comes down to the type of meddling.
Kingdom of the Sun was going to be glorious by all accounts, but the studio pushed for something more comedic in nature, but by all accounts that "we're looking more for a comedy" was the majority of the meddling.
With Zootopia it might not even be considered meddling so much. The Disney folks that had been working on the project screened what they had to a Pixar team, who squirmed in their seats, made "ouch" faces, and then turned around and went "okay, constructive criticism time... it sucks. Nobody wanted this city to get a happy ending, its too fundamentally shitty." The Disney crew redid nearly from start with that feedback.
Chicken Little seems to have gotten far more meddling, and the writers were given far less room to write themselves. The girl needs to be a boy, there needs to be a father-son plot. It needs to be more like Shrek, cynical fairy tales. It needs aliens. Yes, aliens.
The execs saying "push the comedy more" can be classified as exec meddling, but what happened to Chicken Little is more what people mean when they use the term. Just a bunch of unconnected nonsense demands. "It needs aliens," jesus fucking christ.
