Mixed Messages
Over The Hedge misses its own point
from the April 2006 INsite Magazine
Last month I went to a pre-screening of the new Dreamworks CGI animation, Over The Hedge. It was hilarious. Kids were running all over the place. Jeffrey Katzenberg was telling three 60-year-old women about his vacation to Africa. Three blondes in skin-tight tan pants were working the room at a sustained distance of ten feet from each other, apparently engaged a smiling contest. An entire table was covered in berries.
I settled in next to a pole and watched. Next to me some Emerson kid was telling some rich guy how meticulously he spell-checks his e-mails, which is the reason why he doesn’t send a lot of e-mails . . . because of how long it takes to spellcheck them. I think he was trying to score an internship.I bet he got it. Spelling is important.
After a while Wanda Sykes showed up and cameramen from the Globe and the Metro took her picture. Almost everyone was completely covered in berries. The guy from the Globe shot second and stood on a chair to get a better angle, reminding me
why I prefer the Globe to the Metro.
Eventually the smiling blondes ushered everyone into the theater where Katzenberg introduced us to the trailer for the next Dreamworks CGI feature
(Flushed Away), a CGI short that will precede Over The Hedge in theaters this Summer (First Flight), and finally the film itself. Director Tim Johnson also had this to say:
“I may look rather nattily dressed today, but in fact I am naked in front of you because that’s what it feels like to show a movie that is unfinished. When we say 90% we mean it, meaning there are a good 50 or 60 shots in the movie which you will probably be very, very aware of that are, suddenly and completely, not done.”
Fair enough. Actually I had already seen the movie a week before, and Tim Johnson wasn’t kidding. The movie I saw wasn’t finished. It was hilarious. At any given time, out of nowhere, one of the cute, furry animals would be missing its hair, skin, eye sockets, and fur. There were tons of little kids at that screening too (it was noonish on a school day), and without having received any advance warnings or apologies of any kind about the state of the film, the surprise in the room was palpable.
More subtly, as Tim Johnson was to explain later at the second, more glamorous screening, most of the film’s audio mixes were incomplete, and some were simply absent. As odd as it may seem, this omission was the more damaging. Most of the skinless, eyeless creatures appeared in the latter third of the film, and by then most of the kids had already become completely unglued and were wandering the aisles.
I missed the encore performance. When the lights went down at the second screening I followed some more experienced members of the press down a block to the Ritz where we sat down with Johnson and Sykes to talk about the film and the wonders of CGI. It was a nice conversation. They were both really nice people. I was still enjoying my designer tea from the pre-party.
It got me wondering, is this how most big production movies screen in Boston, or just the unfinished ones? After all, this was my first experience at a “big Hollywood release.” They buttered me up with pastries, introduced me to a star and sent me off to write a review. I find myself looking for reasons to like the movie. They’re smart. Definitely spell-checkers.
I imagine that the people who aren’t bribed to go to see this movie when it’s released later this month will go for one of two reasons. One: the person is a kid or looking after a kid, or two: the person heard the movie has a good cast. And it does. The press kit I’m looking at right now has bios on Bruce Willis, Nick Nolte, Gary Shandling, William Shatner, Thomas Haden Church, Avril Lavigne, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy and Steve Carell.
Despite its catalogue of stars, Over The Hedge won’t cross over to adult audiences like Shrek, and it won’t win Best Animated Feature at the Oscars like Wallace & Gromit. This one is just a kids’ movie, though I get the sense that its producers, used to such successes, were aiming high.
The movie, more clumsily than the comic strip that inspired it, wants to hold a mirror up to its audience and make us think about our role as one among many species on Earth. In the meantime it fumbles around for a back story to the comic strip, and a reason to get all the impressive (and, I would imagine, expensive) voice talent into the action. At times the movie stays within itself and remembers that its main characters are animals. These moments—most of them involve Steve Carell—offer some genuine entertainment. The rest of the time, however, the movie just seems like Gary Shandling having a conversation with Bruce Willis.
Judging from the promotion of this movie, this scattershot approach comes from Dreamworks, not Tim Johnson. The poster sells the cast, the press kit sells the message, none of it sells the story.
In the press kit, Producer Bonnie Arnold asserts, “Really, it is we who are in the animals’ backyard, they are not in ours. The comic strip and now the movie are about how suburban sprawl impacts the animals’ lives and how they have to adjust to survive in this new environment.”
The real problem with the Dreamworks approach to this sentiment is in the follow-up. An appropriate segue from a message like this would be a call to action. Rather, there will be a video game. Much of Over The Hedge’s message to adults and children is that we are far too gluttonous. It’s unfortunate, then, that the movie’s promotion conveys the complete opposite as, hands full of berries and mouths full of designer tea, we look into a mirror that Dreamworks holds up to all of us, but not to itself.