Over the Hedge (2006)

Over The Hedge opens with a tickling scenario: a resourceful rodent negotiates a vending machine with startling ingenuity, including the use of a dinosaur-headed grabber toy in chucklesome lime green. His name is RJ (voice of Bruce Willis), a savvy but morally flawed scavenger. Together with competitor Verne (voice of Garry Shandling), the fretful but ethical tortoise, they make up the two lead characters in this situational comedy of errors. RJ & Verne’s buddy-rival spin is arguably modeled after Buzz & Woody from another animated film, Pixar Animated Studio’s Toy Story. Despite the film’s laugh-out-loud humor, the gags come in intermittent bursts without any genuine craft in comedy & drama that usually arise from audience identification of character.

Besides their typical characterization as the likeable bad egg and the clumsy good guy, RJ & Verne’s central conflicts are overly simplistic. Briefly, the former is a victim of an extortionist, while the latter falls prey to a con-man. The con-man is none other than RJ and so the plot hinges on his character turn prior to Act 3 in order to enable a resolution. Therefore, I watched this film with a constant awareness of its flimsy construction without any emotional involvement.

The generally light-hearted tone of Over The Hedge complements the few successful gags, especially those I vaguely recall as involving a naked tortoise & his naturally molded garment, but the film could not sustain its humor within any given scene. I suspect that this deficiency is due to the screenplay’s characters. Over the Hedge substitutes believable characters for situation-based comedy and in this imbalance fails to match the surprising flair found in the writing of Dreamwork’s own tongue-in-cheek hit comedy, Shrek.