Over the Hedge Delivers
By Orson Scott Card

Over the Hedge looked like it was going to be charming and funny — and it delivered.

The odd thing is that I don't really enjoy the comic strip it was based on.  I rarely find it amusing.  But for an animated feature, the idea of animals forced to deal with suburbia in order to find food is a good one.

Having had raccoons get into my garbage cans, I understand the frustration of getting to pick up your trash because some wild animals were hungry and way too clever with their hands.

And the number of squirrel corpses on the streets of our neighborhood, especially in spring and fall, attest to the not-quite-brightness of the squirrel brain.

The film handled the satire of human impact on nature rather well.  Yes, our eating habits are funny compared to the habits of animals (though also remarkably similar, as our bodies, like theirs, work to build up fat during our perpetual "summer" of bounteous harvests) — but the biggest danger to the raccoon hero is another animal.

And the woman who is the primary human foe of the animals is so exaggeratedly fanatical in her hatred of anything messy and natural that few in the audience will take it personally when she gets her comeuppance.  Since the film shows "normal" people rejecting her fanaticism, and we watch her persecuting others for such crimes as letting their lawn grow a half inch too long, she is definitely not one of us.

And I was relieved that for once the ridiculous pantaloon in a suburban satire was not the man of the house.  The woman hired an exterminator to come and deal with the "pests."

Funny, though — you could take the sex-stereotyping two ways.  If you want to see the film as anti-male, it would be easy: The only male character is the buffoon, the Verminator — but he's an outsider, a hired gun, not part of the social system.  The suburban neighborhood is weirdly without adult males.  We get glimpses, but the people who talk are all women and girls.  The main female character is not married and shows no interest in marriage.

On the other hand, the control-freak nightmare character is a woman with neither husband nor children — so this could be viewed as an anti-feminist tract, despising the powerful woman figure.

In other words, prickly people determined to be offended will find ample grounds for it.

To which the answer is: Come on, we made the main human character a woman because why not?  Flip a coin.  And we made her an obsessive control freak because there really are people like that and they're funny in a horrible kind of way.  And we had her live alone because could you imagine anybody being married to somebody like that?  Didn't you see Spanglish?

So forget all that silliness.  This is a film about the talking animals — and about the social dynamics represented by those animals.  We have a group headed by a prudent, careful leader who really has the best interests of all his "family" in mind, and a newcomer offering all kinds of cool stuff that seduces the group into great danger.  Everybody makes mistakes.

The only thing I actually object to is the downward redefining of the word "family."  We saw it in Lilo & Stitch, and we've got it here, too.  In a world like ours, where a vast number of kids grow up outside the normal dad-mom-and-kids family, there's a lot of pressure to make them feel better by redefining family to include "everybody you like that you can count on."

But we already had words for that: We call them "friends" and "communities."  The word "family" has a very different meaning, with the implication of blood relationship and permanency.

Wouldn't we be better off to keep "family" as a goal to be aspired to, so that (for instance) a teenage girl might aspire to find a man who would help her create a permanent family for her children rather than one that will mate with her and go away?  And how many divorced kids really think it's cool to have two "families"?  For most of them (and we have the data on this) what they actually experience is one family, and it's broken.

So when a movie like this uses the word "family" to refer to possums, porcupines, a squirrel, a turtle, and a raccoon, when they actually function as a community of friends, I think we're doing ourselves a disservice.  Fuzzing the meaning of a word doesn't change the real world, or the genuine hunger people feel to have a real family.  It just means we'll need a new word to cover the meaning that "family" used to have.

But let's set that little social trend aside, too — because, like gender stereotypes, it has almost nothing to do with our experience of the actual movie Over the Hedge.  For adults, it's a delightful satire on humans from an animal-like perspective; for kids, it's a cool story about an outsider who joins a group of friends in order to exploit them, but ends up caring about them and being loyal to them.  Lots of adventure, lots of funny stuff, with great animation and exquisite timing.

The voice work is terrific.  Bruce Willis, Garry Shandling, and Wanda Sykes create wonderful characters — though they remain recognizable as themselves.  Even more impressive are Steve Carell (as the manic squirrel) and William Shatner (as the father possum) — because we don't recognize them at all.  In fact, the voice casting was perfect, right down to Omid Djalili as the hilariously vain Persian cat.

We watched this movie with a group that included stodgy adults (moi), teenagers, preteens, and rugrats, and all of them enjoyed it.  You don't have to have children with you to have a great time.

This is easily Dreamworks's best animated film to date.  And it's worth staying through the credits — if you don't have kids who need to get to a bathroom to throw up their popcorn.  There are funny bits scattered here and there through the credits.  And it's also amusing to see that apparently every single person who worked at Dreamworks during the making of this film, including several Fedex and UPS delivery guys, have their names listed.

The only thing left is to start listing the names of audience members on the opening weekend.  And maybe the neighbors of the people who made the movie.

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