Over the Hedge (2005)

Directed by: Tim Johnson (Antz, Sinbad), co-directed by Ash Brannon (Toy Story)
Written by: Len Blum
Produced by: Bonnie Arnold (Toy Story)
Co-produced by: Jim Cox (Beauty & the Beast, Ferngully)

Production Started On: July 15, 2002
Release Date: Holiday 2005 (could be October or November)

CAST

The mischievous con artist raccoon R.J.... Jim Carrey
The sensitive turtle Verne... Garry Shandling
Norbert the Owl... Gene Wilder

STORY

In Over the Hedge, Jim Carrey will voice the mischievous con-artist raccoon R.J. and Garry Shandling will be the voice of the sensitive turtle named Verne. When R.J., Verne and their woodland friends find a suburban housing development encroaching on their forest home, Verne's first instinct is to retreat into his shell and leave, but the ever-opportunistic R.J. sees a treasure trove to be had from his unsuspecting new neighbors. Together, Verne and R.J. form an unlikely friendship as they learn to co-exist with--and even exploit--this strange new world called suburbia.

Director Tim Johnson further revealed in a June 2003 interview that "the movie is based on a terrific comic strip. It's about a smart-aleck raccoon [Jim Carrey] who wakes up from a long slumber near a retiring turtle [Garry Shandling]. They realize that suburbia has taken over their home while they were sleeping." Instead of despair, the animals find nirvana. "They can't believe humans are nice enough to put out food for them in giant silver cans! They think they've found paradise." Meanwhile, he says, Carrey "cons the other animals into doing risky stuff like infiltrating the backyards. The animals think the sprinklers look like the fountains outside the Bellagio Hotel in Vegas. They also marvel at human behavior. Jim has a great line where he says, 'Humans feel the deep-seated need to connect, and they also like to sit on their cans. That's why they watch TV.' "

INTERESTING FACTS

You can currently view the daily online comic strip of Over the Hedge, by Michael Fry and T. Lewis, at Comic.com.

The two main characters are R.J (the racoon) and Verne (the turtle), a comedic duo described as "a couple of boisterous 'Boyz in the Wood' who don't take the encroachment of their habitat sitting down."

Michael Fry told Comics2Film in February 2001 that the concept had been picked up by Jeffrey Katzenberg at Dreamworks to be developed by Pacific Data Images. "Jim Cox (FernGully) is still producing, but now with his wife Penney Finkelman Cox (Antz, Prince of Egypt) on board as well," Michael Fry then told C2F. "We're in a race against the strike to get a writer putting a script together based on an original story by myself, T. Lewis and Jim Cox." The movie had originally been set up at Fox Family Films. However, that studio put the movie into turnaround. "Things look much more promising at Dreamworks," Fry said back then.
Verne the turtle exploring a human garden...
USA Today, which first talked about Shark Tale, mentioned in a May 2002 article that Over the Hedge would be a DreamWorks digital picture, tentatively set for 2005, about a raccoon and a turtle that "cope with suburban sprawl."

DreamWorks Pictures announced in July 15, 2002 that it had recruited the comedic talents of Jim Carrey and Garry Shandling to voice the lead characters of Over the Hedge.

An insider posted a few days later that he had seen "the preliminary CG designs, and I actually like them better than the comic strip drawings. Funnier and more charming. I especially like the voice choices. It could turn out to be a nifty little movie."

Over the Hedge artist T. Lewis confirmed to AICN on May 5, 2003 that "the strip was bought by Dreamworks and is slated for a 2005 holiday opening. Jim Carrey voices our star, RJ (a raccoon). Gary Shandling has signed to do Verne (a turtle, and as is usual with Verne, the source of the confusion). It'll be CGI. Wildly talented storyboard guys and gals are currently grinding away feverishly. My trips to the studio have been mind bending. Truthfully, it's been fascinating and humbling to have such howitzer-sized guns trained on our little creation." Tim Johnson (Antz, Sinbad) was confirmed as the main director, Ash Brannon (Toy Story) will co-direct, Bonnie Arnold (Toy Story) produces and Jim Cox (Beauty & the Beast, Ferngully) is attached to the project as co-producer. Len Blum (Meatballs, Private Parts) wrote the final screenplay.

Sinbad's digital supervisor Craig Ring revealed during a Q&A on June 13, 2003 that "Over the Hedge is about animals living on the edge of suburbia. Two of the main characters in the comic strip are a turtle and a raccoon (...) and the movie is gonna be about how these two characters met. The big challenges on that are going to be creating that suburbian environment, and lots of furry characters, and [finding] the right amount of believability. One of the really interesting things to me about computer graphics is how stylized do you make it, what is the look going to be? For a long time the holy grail in computer graphics has been photo realism, [until] Final Fantasy pushed how real those characters looked further than anybody had before. But then [you would] sit in the theater and go, 'This is really cool, but... why?' I think what that did was help the computer graphics community [get the quest for] photo realism out of its system]. We are doing a lot of exploration on Over the Hedge, we are really early in the process, we are doing a lot of talking about how real we want it, and how stylized--and if we do stylize, what kind of stylization is that? Is it going to be dropping out details in shade, is it dropping out details in texture, have a lighting to the right, things like that. Over the Hedge is looking at our world [and] one of the interesting things about it is that you can see a funhouse mirror view of ourselves, [so] we have to be close to photo realism. You can't go with a completely paintury look because then you'd lose the opportunity to take a humorous visions at our own backyard, like with lawnmowers with huge big racing car tires, and so forth, giant big screen TVs... You have to have some grounding in reality but we don't want to make it look like we shot a live action film [either]." And the preliminary artwork I've seen so far for this movie does look amazing!

Yahoo! Movies attended a presentation for the movie in July 2003, and reported that "as director Tim Johnson describes it, this is a simple (and funny) fable about how animals might perceive us humans, and how our actions impact their lives. Johnson's goal with the animation style of this movie is to keep the animals faithful to a cartoonish interpretation (they sort of look like the 'Pogo' gang), set in a version of a woods from a tortoise's eye view. So, all of the background art (especially the interiors of human houses) has a grand scale to it. As Johnson put it, a refrigerator would tower over a racoon the way a six-story building looks to us, complete with a grainy feel to things in the distance (i.e., the ceiling, windows, etc.) that might be outside the field-of-vision of small animals. In other words, the human world looks like a world of giants, which is an obvious approach, but I don't think I've ever seen expressed so well. One other thing that really sold me on this movie, however, was Jim Carrey's performance as RJ. Carrey did a great deal of improving with the script, and so it makes sense that the clip I was shown sounded customized for Carrey's bombastic delivery style; hearing him 'sell' Vern the Tortoise on the wonders of human civilization was quite fun. This presentation also delivered the news that Gene Wilder is the third voice cast member to be announced, as Norbert the Owl. Of the four presentations I saw this week, this one is tied for my favorite (along with Sharkslayer). In some ways, it's the 'smaller' of the four (the other two being Shrek 2 and Madagascar), but the limitations of the setting were attractive to me, because of that strong sense of place that Tim Johnson's presentation sold to us."

Director Tim Johnson told Sci Fi Wire in July 2003 that makers of the computer-animated feature worked closely with the creators of the irreverent newspaper comic strip on which it is based. Creators Michael Fry and T. Lewis are "both involved. Mike Fry and T. Lewis are pretty excited, obviously, with this kind of stuff. And they're both involved. So they're getting script pages and giving us notes, and they'll come to early screenings of the picture. Our goal is to make, not really a negative comment on the consumer culture we live in, although we will be having a little fun at the expense of us humans, but to really show us how much we take for granted. We have it pretty darn good in this world, don't we? Especially in this country. And so to actually take a look from an animal's point of view, to be thrust into the 21st century in front of big-screen TVs and Cheetos, they're having a pretty good time. And hopefully so will all of us when we see it in theaters in a mere two and a half years."

While most of the animals fear the new neighbors, R.J., the con artist racoon (Jim Carey), convinces turtle friend Verne (Gary Shandling) and the others that there is a gold mine to be found in the trash cans and homes of the human invaders. Animation Magazine explains that "the filmmakers decided to frame all the shots from the perspective of the animals so that the human dwellings and vehicles appear massive in size. For instance, the wheel of an SUV appears to be several stories tall and a common household kitchen takes on cathedral-like proportions. While that creative choice may yield interesting possibilities, the decision to go 3D is a bit disappointing given the property's 2D origins and the sheer beauty of the hand-drawn conceptual art shown."

Director Tim Johnson revealed in August 2003 that Over the Hedge would also be a musical, but use popular songs instead of creating a new soundtrack. "Remember in Shrek, we used pop tunes to great effect as score. So throughout Shrek, the lyric and time of the pop tunes did what a traditional score does, commented either humorously or emotionally on the happenings of the film. We're going to do that and go one better." Johnson promises to time the beats of the music with events on the screen. A falling garbage can lid will represent a cymbal crash. A squirrel sliding down a wire will represent a guitar slide. "I like to think that a lot of animation was designed by somebody looking out their window and watching a squirrel run along a high wire, that springy, slinky action is the invention of squash and stretch for animation. Well, those are the main characters in our picture. That plus music and I think we're going to really celebrate animation."

Tim Johnson explained in summer 2003 that "this character RJ is Harold Hill from The Music Man. He's a con man. He blows into town, finds some innocent and gullible animals whom he trains and tricks into [pillaging] the suburbs for him, and when things get sticky, he steals all the stuff in the middle of the night and goes onto the next berg. He loves his job. It's good to be a raccoon con man on the road. Verne [is the leader of] the community of a sort of little Amish group of animals like some farmers who wake up at the crack of dawn and go to sleep only when the last light of day is gone, eating moldy acorns and buried roots. It's a pretty subsistence living but it's a tight knit friendly, loving community, and Verne is their anal retentive overly concerned leader. These two are sort of the bulk of the story, the guy who's Mr. Carpe Diem grab what you can today and celebrate life, and the guy who is only worried about tomorrow. Together, they make a whole person." When Verne first goes over the hedge, he has an unpleasant experience in the world of humans. "He's used as a hockey puck by kids playing street hockey. An SUV speed bumps over him. Neighborhood dogs toss him around. He goes running back into the forest and goes, 'Oh my God, the humans have cut down half the forest. We've got half of our food. We're going to have to work twice as hard to actually get by this year, but listen everybody. We'll be fine as long as we stick together and as long as we never go back over that hedge.'" RJ comes along and offers an alternative. "RJ the squirrel strides in, 'You poor naïve puppies. You're missing the whole point. The humans are a gift from God. Why, they put food in silver cans just for you.' Then he opens up from his Walmart bag a bag of Doritos. Well, if nacho cheese smell could have a vision, it would be a shockwave of such ambrosial intensity. The animals, basically it's like one sniff of heroin. The animals go on a tour and RJ takes them through a backyard. Well, it's wondrous. It's Disneyland and Las Vegas rolled into one. The backyard sprinklers are like the Bellagio fountain. Their first sight of television is awestruck. They're breath fogs the glass. And it culminates in those silver cans he was talking about. Under RJ's leadership, they knock them over and out spills the best food these animals have ever seen, smelled or tasted in their life. Pizza rinds, leftover Oreo cookies, it's amazing. The animals run back to the forest gorging themselves, and it's only Verne, the cautious type that goes I don't know what it is about this guy, I still don't trust him." Eventually, the humans threaten to encroach upon the animals' habitat and RJ and Verne must team up to stop them. In this exploration of the human world, Johnson promises to have some fun with our culture. "Our goal is to make not really a negative comment on the consumer culture we live in, although we will be having a lot of fun at the expense of us humans, but to really show us how much we take for granted. We have it pretty darn good in this world, don't we? Especially in this country, and so to actually take a look from an animal's point of view, an aboriginal species eating moldy acorns and are happy for it. To be thrust into the 21st Century in front of big screen TVs and Cheetos, they're having a pretty good time. And hopefully, so are all of us when we see it in theaters in a mere two and a half years."