It's just a largely inoffensive, vaguely environmentalist (inasmuch as being anti-sprawl is pro-environment) assembly-line animation featuring the usual passel of aging and/or second-run celebrities subbing for trained voice performers as anthropomorphic CGI animal bodies engaged in slapstick, stink jokes, and other interchangeable ephemera for the delight of our toddlers. If you feel as though you've seen Over the Hedge a hundred times already, that's because it's been cobbled together from a hundred other identical pictures--and if you have a little trouble afterwards remembering a thing about it, well, it's only natural that something with no nutritional value would pass right through you. That's not to say there's no fertile ground to be mined here in exploring the line between the natural-natural and the human natural (a line that the Japanese puzzler Pom Poko attempts to describe to similar effect)--safe to say, in fact, that a great satire lies in the suburban morass as viewed through the eyes of the "un-civilized." But Over the Hedge is a slave to the theoretical peanut gallery, resorting to manufacturing a villain and then staging a series of boom/crash operas. Though Pixar's upcoming Cars can pretty fairly be described as awful, it's Pixar's legacy of brilliant children's entertainments that DreamWorks has tried to ape with its puerile, art-destroying, post-pop Shrek series, and if Over the Hedge at least resists the scatology that marks Shrek as low entertainment for the lowest common denominator, it still can't quite make that jump from loud noises to real insight and value.

RJ (voiced by Bruce Willis) pisses off a bear fresh from hibernation (Nick Nolte, typecast), who makes him an offer he can't refuse by ordering him to restore his winter stash, toot sweet. So our hero enlists a gaggle of good-hearted, dim-witted wildlife (including a skunk (Wanda Sykes, typecast); a frenetic squirrel (Steve Carrell); a hilarious, William Shatner-voiced possum; and RJ's turtle pal/conscience Verne (Garry Shandling)) to infiltrate suburbia, liberate various and sundry foodstuffs, and generally put their hides on the line to save his. RJ is to learn a lesson, of course, and comeuppance to is to be had by not only the bear but also the evil head of the local HOA, Gladys (Allison Janney), and the Wallace & Gromit-borrowed ace exterminator, The Verminator (Thomas Haden Church). Both truisms lead to the downfall of a picture that simply did not need a villain besides the encroachment of Man into the wild.

The first few minutes of Over the Hedge are spot-on brilliant as RJ introduces his charges to the excesses of human existence, which lie in stark contrast to their own subsistence, hardscrabble lives. Humans are seen as worshipping at altars of food; if only the picture had followed these observations through to the big box marts and gas stations, it might actually have had something to say. Alas, all it ends up doing is tap-dancing around a Persian character and setting up the skunk with a cat so inbred it's lost its sense of smell. When the film is funny, it's funny that way: not insightful, just sort of grotesque, leading to the inevitable conclusion that it's fun to watch animals do people things and almost get smeared by propane tanks, and not as fun to consider how many opportunities they're missing in a film with this premise. Consider especially the usefulness of junk food as a Pavlovian prod (and how Dr. Phil might be junk food for the soul)--how completely these animals give themselves over to the sway of trans fat, carbonation, and processed sugar. (More, how these trifles are packaged in lovely arrays of irresistibly intoxicating packages and colours.) There's a real movie in there somewhere about pods and the food industry. Shame that Over the Hedge's only real presence is that it's part and parcel of the same excreted legacy.-Walter Chaw

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the critic

Published: May 24, 2006