Zany fun! Watch it!

The last 'animal' animation I watched was Madagascar, and while a lot of people liked that, I thought it tried too hard to be something for everyone and didn't really succeed all that well. So when I decided to watch Over the Hedge, I figured it would be more of the same and wasn't really expecting too much. I was pleasantly surprised :)

Over the Hedge is the story of RJ, a raccoon who just has to have his cake, and eat it too. His greed for human food, particularly a weakness for Spuddies potato chips (in Pringles containers) leads him to all kinds of mishaps, beginning with having to replace all the food he stole from Vincent the bear within a week, or else.

That would have been mission impossible, except that RJ falls in with a group of assorted "foragers": Verne the tortoise who leads the group, a father-daughter pair of possums, a hedgehog family, Stella the skunk, and Hammie the squirrel. In them RJ suddenly sees salvation: if he can just dupe them into helping him steal food from the suburban homes just "over the hedge", he'll have it made.

How RJ slowly wins the foragers to his cause (simple. Use nacho chips in what looked to me like Lays packaging) and leaves conservative Verne in the dust, learns the meaning of family and then loses his cache of food (twice), then outwits (with the help of friends) Vincent and the Verminator (license plate VERMIN8TR) called in by the humans makes for non-stop action that's pretty funny at times.

There really is something for everyone, even if you don't like the quality of the animation, which I found high, but nothing fantastic. The hedge looked 'real', though the humans didn't. The animals were really cute and furry - built to be marketed as soft toys, I bet - and had wonderful body language and facial expressions, together with really appropriate voice dubbing. Even the music, which tends to be unmemorable for me, had lyrics that made a lot of sense.

The kids will like the action, while the adults will like it because it's funny without being pretentious. I don't watch many movies, but even I recognised the Mission Impossible spoof with the red laser lights and my favourite, the freeze frame action segment where only Hammie (hyped up on caffeine!) walks through a frozen world with no problem (Matrix? or House of Flying Daggers?).

The animal characters are drawn larger than life but still easily recognisable. Heather the possum is kinda ashamed that her dad is old-fashioned (at least, she changes her mind later). There's always one hedgehog kid which is riling the other two. Hammie is a hyperactive me! me! please, me! kind of squirrel, while RJ is all reasonable about helping everyone when he's really got that hidden agenda.

Perhaps the only detractor for Over the Hedge is that the humans really take a back seat in the plot and are the enemy, versus something like Toy Story or Monsters Inc. where human children whose essential human-ness are part of the plot. The human characters are a little more one-dimensional, though of course the whole story is told from the animals' perspective. Gladys (car license plate GLADY$$$), the head of the real estate association, is a selfish woman who hates animals and is only worried about how the value of the property will fall with all the 'vermin around'. Two girl scouts are more interested in getting disgusted over Hammie the 'rabid' squirrel.

But the whole works really well. You have the play of good against evil, of flawed characters changing for the better, love scenes and comic scenes, and sheer outrageous stunts to make sure RJ gets all the food he needs. Truly, something for everyone.