ANI-MOVIES, *Over The Hedge

The 90s comic strip Over The Hedge by Michael Fry managed to get its own full-length animated film from DreamWorks Animation in 2006. Adapted by Meatballs writer Len Blum and Brother Bear writer David Hoselton, this feature was directed by DreamWorks regular Tim Johnson and former Disney animator Karey Kirkpatrick. The story is loosely based on the comic as it shoveled in several original characters in order to make this an "Ocean's Eleven with critters" cross-genre movie. Not only was the cast widened to fit this heist movie parody, but it stars several celebrity actors as opposed to standard voice actors which might have made it more endearing. Original comic characters like The Tree That Knows Stuff were completely erased so we could have William Shatner playing an overacting opossum with pop singer Avril Lavigne as his embarrassed daughter. The cast went through numerous celebrities who were first considered to be in the film like Bill Murray and Harold Ramis even though they weren't talking to each other at the time, as well as Jim Carrey and Gene Wilder, but the two main characters were filled by Bruce Willis playing a Hudson Hawk clone raccoon along with Garry Shandling as a worrisome turtle. Paramount released this as they handle most of DreamWorks cartoon flicks, even though they managed to make it a hit, despite the fact that they never made an obligatory animated holiday special from the show.

Set in the Midwest lives shifty raccoon RJ who owns a miniature golf bag with a dimensional pocket in it capable of containing nearly anything that can be dropped into it, and he's trying to get the last bag out of a vending machine just at the tail end of winter. RJ attempts to make off with the hidden stash of hibernating bear Vincent who wakes up and frightens into losing the entire wagonload of. Vincent gives RJ a week to get him the whole lot of snacks back, specifically a brand of canned chips. Now on the hunt for more food, RJ comes across a new suburban area that just sprouted up during the course of a single season, which also surprises a jumbled family of forest animals who discover that they're turf has been turned into haven for blue-collar workers. RJ convinces the critters lead by a paranoid turtle named Verne into helping him gather a ton of food, although he doesn't tell them he's doing it to pay off a debt to an angry bear. The team manages to gather plenty of food to fill up the hollowed-out log they all live in, so the fussy homeowner president calls an officious exterminator who considers himself the Dirty Harry of pest control. RJ manages to work his way into the animals' hearts much to Verne's dismay who trusts his twitchy tail over giving into RJ's schemes. It gets so bad that they lose all the snacks they took from the nearby houses which lie over the hedge that they live behind. RJ gets them to pull together for one big haul from the irritated homeowner president even though she's rigged her lawn with every illegal kind of vermin snatcher possible. Vincent decides to pick this time to collect his debt while a huge chase between the bear, a ticked-off woman, and a fanatical exterminator. This leads to some fantastic Looney Tunes shenanigans and cartoon sight gags in one long final chase. Things of course work out for the backyard critters, and RJ finds a place in his new family of friends.

Over The Hedge diverges from the original source material quite a lot, so some comic strip purists might find the movie more than a little disheartening. DreamWorks did an exemplary job on the CGI-animated production. The extended cast might seem a little much, but it does pan out as it is a spoof of crime movies. The casting of SCTV regulars Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara as the parents of a trio of porcupines is good as they've played Midwestern couples in various other projects, plus Nick Nolte did go out of his way to sound like a bear probably much to the delight of Rifftrax fans, and others like Wanda Sykes and Thomas Hayden Church make it enjoyable, but hands down Steve Carell as the high-strung squirrel Hammy was so memorable that he became the unofficial mascot of the movie despite being a secondary character. This is an unoffensive family flick that covers a wide range of ages and is largely replayable.