Posted on Friday, December 29, 2006 4:24 AM
Well, I'm suffering a bit from insomnia for some reason, so I decided to check two of the big animated movies coming from the United States this year;
The Wild and
Over the Hedge. The other one is
Cars, but after seeing the preview on the bonusdisc of
The Incredibles, I decided to skip that one alltogether.
I should have skipped The Wild as well, by the way; apparently,
I was right when I presumed the movie was Madagascar and Finding Nemo blended together in a stinking pile of goo. Not only that; the movie reeks of The Lion King as well, and where Finding Nemo and The Lion King were good pieces of work (except for the songs in the latter), Madagascar was not and The Wild is even worse.
Enough about that; let's move on to Over the Hedge. The story is again not really something to e-mail home about; a raccoon lies and cheats to a bunch of forest animals to get help gathering food for a bear, or he will be on that bear's menu, since he stole an ungodly amount of food from said bear.
Are you still with me? Good.
Along the way, the raccoon learns what it means to have a family and to be part of one. So much for the story; on to the rest of the film, which is very, very good.
Over the Hedge is a Dreamworks film; the same Dreamworks that brought us Madagascar, Shrek and its sequels and a host of sequels are in the making.
Now, I didn't really like Shrek or Madagascar, because of the songs, the obvious jokes and other nagging things that really killed these movies for me.
But I liked this one. :) The jokes were funny and timed really well, some of the tricks they used really worked (like the hyperactive squirrel being fed some energy drink; you'd expect some brown blurs of its actions, but instead, the animators slowed the world down to show what the squirrel achieved in a few milliseconds in real time) and the actors did a splendid job voicing the characters. "Fire in the hall!" *Whoomp*
Very funny, I really enjoyed it.
So, this might be the first time I'm recommending a Dreamworks flic; the weak plot set aside, Over the Hedge is a hoot!
Cheers, K.