Movie Review: Over the Hedge

Movie Review: Over the Hedge                                                                                                  4-7-21

Over the Hedge is about a lone raccoon named RJ (Bruce Willis), who accidentally spilt all the food for a brutish Bear named Vincent (Nick Nolte). Vincent tells him that if RJ recovers all the food within a week, he’ll let him live. RJ meets a group of misfit animals, including Verne the down-to-Earth turtle (Garry Shandling), a nutty squirrel named Hammy (Steve Carral), a sassy skunk named Stella (Wanda Sykes), and a thespian possum named Ozzy (William Shatner), and their forest has been destroyed to make room for a Cul-De-Sac. RJ uses his new friends to get more food to pay off his debt, but in the process, he discovers something that he never had: A family.

Over the Hedge is yet another forgotten gem with smooth animation, a colorful cast of characters, and a story with a message on how suburban sprawl impacts wild animals’ lives and how they have to adjust to survive in this new environment. As producer Bonnie Arnold puts it 'We (human beings) are the ones in the animals' backyard, and they are not in ours'.

As with other DreamWorks films, the film is full of jokes that people will either like or hate. I personally think it’s funny that RJ points out that people exercise just so they can eat more.

If I were to complain about one thing, I’d have to say that some of the human characters in the movie look kind of ugly. However, this is forgiving because DreamWorks wasn’t ready to make a CG movie starring humans yet, as they wanted to avoid the Uncanny Valley*.

Stella popping out of a cake.

In conclusion, during a year that saw many CG animated films, Over the Hedge is a fun film to watch around April. It’s also much much better than either Nut Job films, which the first one having a very similar premise to Over the Hedge.

Rating: 3.38 stars out of 5.

*Uncanny Valley is a term used in computer graphics: The more realistic you make a CG character, the creepier it gets. When DreamWorks switched to CG in 2003, they shy away from putting humans in their films other than sequels to Shrek. However, Conrad Vernon, director of Shrek 2 and Monsters vs Aliens, points out that if you make a human more cartoony, the creepiness subsides. With stylization from the likes of David James, Kathy Alteiri, and Christophe Lautrette, DreamWorks was able to give visually-appealing human-starring films like Monsters vs Aliens, The Croods, and the critically-acclaimed How To Train Your Dragon.