“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

From Wall Street to Mainstreet, U.S.A., you could hear the Disney stockholders’ cry.

“Eisner ruined the partnership with Pixar!”

But not to worry. Disney is perfectly capable of doing its own 3-D cartoons. Or so the Mouse House would have you believe.

“Chicken Little,” the first Disney-post-Pixar 3-D cartoon to hit theaters, is perfectly competent animation. It just lacks Pixar’s wit and heart. If this is what the studio’s animation future looks like, the best we can hope for is on a par with “Ice Age,” “Shark’s Tale,” “Shrek II” – pretty, and pretty mediocre.

Lots of pop-tune montages stretch this thinner-than-thin comedy into its kid-friendly 78 minutes. With its yak-yak-yak chatter about “closure” and jokes like the voice of AOL sputtering, “Your hate mail box is full,” it’s a comedy that will zip straight over the heads of the 10-and-unders. “Chicken” is almost all filler, no heart.

The story, though, has “can’t miss” built into it. Chicken Little (voiced by Zach Braff of TV’s “Scrubs”) is a shrimp of a chick who once embarrassed himself and his widowed dad (Garry Marshall) by proclaiming that the sky was falling.

“Keep a low profile,” Dad urges him. Don’t draw attention to yourself.

But what’s a chick to do when the sky really is falling?

A piece of an alien space ship, one with cloaking invisibility, hits him. And by golly, Mayor Turkey Lurkey, Goosey Loosey, Morkubine Porcubine, even the even Foxy Loxy, should be warned.

Only the Ugly Duckling (Joan Cusack), the Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn) and the daffy Fish-out-of-Water believe him.

Dad? He has a lesson to learn.

“Ya gotta listen to your children. Even if they have nothing to say.”

Child psychotherapy message aside, the thinness of this reveals itself in an instant. The fish is a knockoff of “South Park’s” Kenny (muffled voice). The incessant pauses while another pop tune (“The End of the World as We Know It,” “We Are the Champions,” “Gonna Make You Sweat,” the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” and many others plays out “Shrek”-style) betray a lack of ideas.

Here’s a dirty little secret to movie cartoons: The more “names” in the cast, the weaker the movie. Patrick Stewart voices a teacher, Don Knotts is the mayor, “Toy Story” vet Wallace Shawn shows up, with Patrick Warburton, Amy Sedaris, Catherine O’Hara, Harry Shearer, Adam West, Fred Willard and others clocking in. None, save for West, makes an impression.

The “War of the Worlds” slam-bang action in the third act may work better in 3-D, another gimmick Disney is trying in select theaters. But even that’s a sign of desperation.

When Disney can’t hit a tried-and-true fairytale adaptation out of the park, maybe it’s time to give up the ghost and get Pixar back on the phone. Or put up the computers and go back to what animators used to use – the drawing board.