This year, DreamWorks Animation celebrates its 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Callie Petch is going through their entire animated canon, one film a week for the next 30 weeks, and giving them a full-on retrospective treatment. Prior entries can be found here, should you desire.
12] Over the Hedge (19th May 2006)
Budget: $80 million
Gross: $336,002,996
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 75%
For a lot of movie folk, that is to say folk that work in movies, there is a saying that I imagine follows them around everywhere like a really annoying ghost that just won’t quite get the hint and leave already: “you’re only as good as your last film”. It’s definitely applicable to prominent animation companies whose filmic output has a kind of studio auteurship attached to whatever they do put out. Like, nobody looks at Shrek and goes, “Oh, that’s an Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson joint!” just like how nobody looks at Madagascar and goes “That is an Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath production!”
With animation, unless the director has already been established (Genndy Tartakovsky, Lauren Faust when Medusa eventually graces us with its presence) and even then they often have to switch to other medium to make their names very recognisable (Phil Lord and Chris Miller), we typically don’t care about who’s making it. It’s the studio we focus on, and frequently just the studio. This is why that standing of Pixar has taken a major hit in the past few years, because their last three films (Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University) ranged from “good” to “shockingly poor” and we expect better of the studio. This is why Disney are advertising Big Hero 6 as “From the Creators of Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen,” because those were the studio’s last big hits and they indicate that Disney aren’t coasting on their reputation from several decades ago. Hence the application of the phrase, “You’re only as good as your last film.”
DreamWorks Animation’s last film in April of 2006 was the universally lauded Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Except that everyone, arguably quite rightly, attributed that film’s success to its main production company, Aardman Animations. Therefore, DreamWorks Animation’s real last film in April of 2006 was Madagascar. Critics didn’t really like Madagascar. Oh, sure, the public liked Madagascar, but the public also liked Shark Tale. I sort of like Madagascar, but hopefully you get what I mean. It had been about 2 years since Shrek 2 and their one knock-out since then came from a different studio that they were affiliated with rather than themselves. DreamWorks films at that time seemed to be a lot like Adam Sandler comedies, devoid of quality and critical approval yet inexplicably popular with the public.
Therefore, the critical success of Over the Hedge probably came as a surprise to a lot of people, especially since their next few films would firmly restate that, no, DreamWorks had not gotten their mojo back yet. The film ended up Certified Fresh, no less, and many critics awarded it praise for being cleverer, funnier, and just plain better than the other animal related animated movies coming out around that time – 2006 was the point in which that particular sub-genre hit over-saturation as the destination of this link will demonstrate. It even beat out Cars, overall, a feat that I’m pretty sure most caused most people to perform spit-takes the length of whatever room they were in when they got the news.
Financially, the film was a decent success, although, much like with last week’s Wallace & Gromit, not to the degree that DreamWorks would have liked. Over the Hedge debuted in second place with a very respectable $38.4 million. It’s just that, y’know, The Da Vinci Code opened to double that. In any case, the film held strong over the following two weekends against X-Men: The Last Stand and The Break-Up. Then Cars happened. Over the Hedge would close with $155 million domestic and $180 million from international markets, marking a $336 million gross against an $80 million budget, but it only lasted five weeks in the Top 10 domestically and not once did it sit atop the chart. The film was a success, but it arguably wasn’t a big enough success, it wasn’t a Shark Tale level success, which is probably why the planned sequel never happened.
In fact, one could see this “mediocre” box office performance against a critical success as a precursor to the studio’s current problem, especially if one wants to take the Adam Sandler comparison further. Both got their starts on the motion picture stage with pretty darn good films that attained critical respect of some degree and a healthy financial following from the public. Both proceeded to coast once their big financial breakthrough occurred with critically-trashed films that kept making a tonne of money despite their often audience-insulting content. Both occasionally break out of their rut to show off their skills in critically acclaimed films that either underwhelm or out-right bomb financially, sending them scurrying right back to what pays. DreamWorks, obviously, have kicked their arses into gear these past few years, unlike Adam Sandler, and we’ll get to that, so the metaphor falls apart here but hopefully you see what I’m getting at.
It’s weird how the mass public at large keeps rejecting those DreamWorks films that are actually really good. Remember, Mr. Peabody & Sherman from this year is a financial failure and it took multiple weeks for people to change their opinions on whether or not How To Train Your Dragon 2 was actually a financial success. Unlike a lot of critics, I tend to give kids the benefit of the doubt when it comes to films aimed at them. I don’t settle for “good enough” and I don’t let people get away with slinging unwatchable crap their way because kids deserve better and, frequently, do actually know better. Yet, more recent non-franchise DreamWorks films keep underwhelming. Do you think it could be burnout? Poor advertising? After all, I thought Mr. Peabody & Sherman looked like garbage until I actually watched the finished film…
Sorry, I’m just spitballing ideas of various kinds in public. Back to Over the Hedge.
Like a lot of other DreamWorks movies (see also: Sinbad, Shrek, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, How to Train Your Dragon), Over the Hedge is only very loosely related to its source material, a long-running newspaper comic of the same name. In fact, it’s still going strong today, as evidenced by the fact that its website is still posting strips and that the guy who does the drawings – Michael Fry – keeps following, and promptly unfollowing me immediately after, on Twitter whenever I mention this film or sometimes just DreamWorks in general. Now, if, for some reason, Mr. Fry is reading this article, perhaps with a Monday morning cup of coffee in hand and his feet on some kind of footrest, I would like to humbly admit that I am not familiar with the comic strip. In my defence, I’m British. The closest we get to proper newspaper comics in this country is Andy Capp, and nobody should ever have to read Andy Capp.
However, not knowing the source material can oftentimes set one at an advantage when looking at a film. After all, then you’re not spending forever watching a film and mercilessly comparing it to its source material; looking for changes, big or small, good or bad, nitpicking at every little thing and such. Instead, you get to look at it on its own merits, judge it on its own merits. I, for example, recognise that both live-action/CG Garfield films are terrible in their own right, but I will never not be able to separate them from my childhood love of the Garfield & Friends TV series, trade paperbacks of the comics and the subsequent horror I experienced when I saw Garfield dancing to Black Eyed Peas.
Oh, look at me dancing around the issue! Dance-y, dance, dance! “Callie, just tell us if Over the Hedge is any good, already! Stop time-wasting!” Fine! OK! I’ll admit it! I really liked Over the Hedge! You happy now?
I’ll admit that the real reason why I spent so long dancing around the issue of whether Over the Hedge is good or not came down to the fact that I did not like Over the Hedge when I was 11. I was one of those kids that I spent a few paragraphs back being bemused over. I’m rather ashamed of this fact, to be frank, as two years earlier I had really enjoyed Shark Tale and I can’t get away with the “I was a stupid goddamn teenager” excuse because I was 11 and still watched Cartoon Network religiously; it wouldn’t be for another two years until my stupid goddamn teenager habits kicked in. And the reason why I tried to avoid admitting that is because it undermines one of my key arguments as to why Over the Hedge holds up better than anything DreamWorks Animation solely produced between 2003 and 2006.
It really is just as good for adults as it is for kids. See why I didn’t want to divulge disliking that movie when I was a kid? Fact of the matter is, watching this back for the series, I don’t even get why I disliked it, but I did and that very fact undermines this very argument. Nonetheless, despite 11 year-old me being a total nitwit, Over the Hedge really does work about equally for kids and adults. The issue, the one that I imagine was the thing that made me dislike the film when I was its target market, is that it often doesn’t achieve this by double-coding. For example, go back to the first Shrek and its “Do you think he’s compensating for something?” line regarding Farquard’s castle. For kids, it’s a joke about his short height. For adults, it’s a joke about his tiny penis. Hell, Lord Farquad’s name in general! For kids, it’s a silly name. For adults, it sounds like one of your friends saying “f*ckwad” with a bad Mark Wahlberg impression. There are some jokes just for kids and some just for adults, but mostly they cross over with one another.
By contrast, Over the Hedge tends to segregate its jokes with only the occasional cross-over in intended audience. Kids get fart jokes, a wacky comic relief character burping his ABCs, and the sight of a nearly-bald woman being elbow-dropped by police officers. Adults get casting in-jokes, Ben Folds songs, and a lot of not-particularly-subtle satire against white middle-class suburban life. Can you see why kids – and it is kids that drive the success of lower-than-PG-13-animated films due to that continued mainstream stigma that this kind of animation is only enjoyable to children and nobody else, make no mistake – mostly rejected Over the Hedge, especially when the much broader and more-focussed-at-them Cars came along? Unlike that film, which double-coded properly, Over the Hedge has long stretches where kids don’t really have anything to command their attention besides some character designs and animation that… honestly kept looking rather off-putting to me.
Maybe that’s why I really like Over the Hedge now. The purely kid-focussed gags are rather minimal; most of the laughs created for them that aren’t fart jokes etc. come from bits of physical humour which, assuming it’s good enough, crosses between both demographics. Therefore, the really bum jokes don’t drag down the pace of the film for long stretches at a time, as it skips the easy jokes in favour of genuine satire and jokes coming from the characters. And, yes, the satire may not be, say, Network or Great Dictator or In the Loop levels of razor-sharp, but watch RJ’s monologue about food and see how many aspects of human nature you can apply it to when you strip out the specific ties to food and overconsumption.
Throughout, the film takes swipes at that lifestyle, of the clueless people who inhabit it, of the inconsiderate way we tend to view wildlife that encroaches upon our picture-perfect surroundings, and the cost our desire for more puts upon nature and the environment… all things that more than likely flew right over the heads of kids. After all, how are they going to relate to jokes about how suburbia and its white middle class inhabitants, as well as those who often engage in that selfish excess behaviour, are gigantic assholes? Note that I’m not knocking the film for this. After all, remember, I don’t rate animated films based on how much kids will like them, I’m just noting why it didn’t catch on the same way that, say, Madagascar did. The humour is primarily just a little too intelligent, a little too subtle, for kids to completely appreciate, and there’s too much of a gap between the broader jokes for most kids to remain entranced by, especially when Cars would appeal to them more. Again, I’m basing this off of personal experience, so I could be wrong, but at least you’ve got an idea where I’m coming from.
And on the note of “too subtle for kids to appreciate”, the fact that these Ben Folds songs didn’t become massive and nominated for several Academy Awards is one of the great crimes of this modern age. OK, obviously not that bad, but you get the idea. The thing about the Ben Folds songs, and the reason why I love them way more than any other song utilised in a DreamWorks film so far, besides the fact that it’s Ben Folds, is that they work even if you remove the context of the film. A lot of the original songs in films like Spirit, The Road to El Dorado and Joseph are too on-the-nose, too desperate to link into the film they feature in, and their frantic attempts to tie in end up causing songs to lack hooks or memorable lyrics or something that sticks with you after the film has finished.
Compare that with “Heist”. There’s the ultra-catchy horn riff, the vocal harmonies in the background, a super simple yet fun to sing chorus, and the lyrics relate to the film whilst still being open and non-specific enough to apply to similar situations that aren’t the film. Also, despite the toe-tapping and upbeat nature of the song, there’s this tinge of melancholy throughout, as if the narrator knows that the train he’s talking about will eventually stop and maybe even sooner than anticipated, that makes the track stick with me. The “da-da-da”s that initially sounded carefree and triumphant now sound slightly unsure, even mocking. There’s a sense of regret, of fear of some kind of inevitability, and it is so f*cking clever that I have literally no clue as to why it didn’t become some kind of breakout cross-over hit.
(I’ve had it on constant loop on my iPod for the last week.)
But look, great goddamn Ben Folds songs – even the family friendly re-write of “Rockin’ The Suburbs”, although not as venomous and hysterical as the original version, is insightful and entertaining – and smart, funny satire are all well and good. Without some kind of emotional base underpinning the film, though, Over the Hedge would just be a more intelligent Madagascar; entertaining, yes, but lacking in substance and memorability. Fortunately, and more so than any other DreamWorks film covered in this series so far post-Sinbad, Over the Hedge feels like a film whose production was started because somebody wanted to tell a story with characters, rather than a business executive going “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny is Will Smith voiced a fish?” and greenlighting said film with nothing more to it than the dollar signs that lit up his eyes.
Though it is a bit over-stuffed when it comes to characters, to the degree that a lot of them can be boiled down to one specific trait without too much work, the majority do get character arcs of some kind and are not just here to act as designated comic relief. They’re characters, characters of their own kind and any influence their voice actors may have on them is purely down to their having been cast and the voice they bring to the table. Or, to put it another way: Ozzie is a possum and his technique for playing dead is to be as hammy and overly dramatic as is humanly possible. William Shatner plays Ozzie so, obviously, he Shatner’s the scene in which Ozzie has to play dead as a distraction. But rather than feel like a “Hey! We got William Shatner to do that thing William Shatner does!” moment, one that pulls somebody out of the experience by feeling more like a casting gag than something that comes from the character, it still feels in character for Ozzie to over-act that much. It’s his trait, his choice – Shatner just adds to the performance.
And besides, one can’t really remain that cynical about what may or may not have been done for snarky in-jokes and pop culture references. Not when everything in Over the Hedge is brimming with heart. In the characters who constantly re-enforce the bond they share with one another instead of just being needlessly cruel to each other for 80-odd minutes, in the script which has clearly been honed and refined as much as possible so that there’s a genuine reason for every joke (this is why the THX gag got a full-on laugh out of me instead of a sigh of derision), for the characters so that they don’t end up interchangeable or painfully one-dimensional, in the character development that ensures that the attempts at emotion actually mean something… Dammit, somebody wanted to tell a story! Somebody came to this project with the intention of telling a story and saying something! That desire infects nearly every part of the film and bleeds out into the viewer, which helps elevate the parts that work and make the whole damn great.
It’s not perfect, though. Besides the aforementioned younger end of the audience likely being lost – after all, they’re probably expecting something as broad as Shrek 2, it’s by the same people, so a more intelligent comedy based more around an emotional centre may end up turning them off – and skipping the animation and character designs (as my opinion on them keeps shifting every few minutes), the big issue for me that keeps Over the Hedge from that upper echelon is the two leads. Not the characters of RJ and Verne, the voice actors that portray them, Bruce Willis and Gary Shandling. Now, the rest of the cast are mostly great and give off the impression of being cast due to their being the best people for the job – the aforementioned Shatner, Steve Carell, who would later go on to prove his VA talent with the Despicable Me series, and Allison Janney being the standouts – rather than for stunt casting. OK, maybe not so much Avril Lavigne but she’s also decent enough to make that not an issue.
Willis and Shandling… really aren’t. Willis’ problem is that he’s inconsistent, both in terms of quality and in terms of tone. Some of his lines and some of his entire scenes are near spot-on, especially when he plays the too-cool guide to the suburbs for the forest residents. Other times, he’s, well, post-2000s Bruce Willis; lazy, bored, more than a little flat. Then there are multiple times where it’s clear that scenes are being stitched together from individual line takes, like the previously-embedded rabid squirrel scene. Shandling is more consistent, which is his problem. Instead of being a warm, comforting leader/father-figure presence, his lines are almost universally flat and lacking in emotion. It’s especially bad whenever Verne has to display emotion because Shandling, well, doesn’t and that robs many scenes, especially the ones where Verne is supposed to be scared, of a fair chunk of their power. Much of the film hangs on these two leads, and Shandling is never good whilst Willis is really inconsistent; both of which end up distracting.
Hang on, I’m starting to sound like I’m down on Over the Hedge. Let me change tack real quick… Over the Hedge, then, is a damn great film and a definite bright spot in the non-Aardman mid-2000s DreamWorks’ catalogue. It achieves this primarily by being a film, with characters and substance and heart, instead of a formula pitch that was rushed into production half-finished before it had the chance to lose any potential cash. That sounds like damning with faint praise, but it really isn’t meant to be. It’s a highly entertaining film with stuff to say, likeable characters whose arcs feel genuine instead of forced, legitimately funny jokes and, yes, great Ben Folds songs. It may not break any ground, it may not crack anybody’s Favourite Animated Films Ever lists, and it most likely sails right over the heads of children, but it is a damn great film at what it does, balancing cynical satire with heart-on-sleeve character work better than I’ve seen a lot of vastly inferior animated films try this year.
So, hey! Turns out that Younger Me was wrong again, only this time in a good way! How’s about that?
As their first film distributed by Paramount Pictures, Over the Hedge was a qualifiable success, winning back some critics that their past few films had lost but coming up short financially compared to everything else they’d produced. Understandably, many could have been wary about the film for their own reasons; DreamWorks with the possibility that their box office days may have begun a steady decline, and critics who may have been wary that one good film doesn’t mark a total turn around for the company as a whole. Their next film would reset to the status quo, somewhat saddeningly.
However, before that, we have to take one last trip over to Aardman Animations for their second film in two years, the first that was made all in CGI, the last one they would make with DreamWorks, their first release to not receive universal acclaim, and a film sold as “From the creators of Shrek and Madagascar.” Next week, we look at Flushed Away and see whether 2006 Me was right to be immensely disappointed by it.
A brand new entry in The DreamWorks Animation Retrospective will be posted every Monday at 1PM BST.
Callie Petch will tell y’all what it’s like being male, middle-class and white.
Callie Petch 