| Friday, May 26, 2006 |
15:20 - Dreamworks' moon is rising
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Maybe all those "making of" featurettes they've been showing among the previews of recent movies had gotten me all cynical, but I really wasn't expecting too much from Over the Hedge. "Oh boy," I thought. "William Shatner going Rosebud. Garry Shandling, back from the dead. Wanda Sykes as an 'urban' skunk. That dowdy Minnesotan couple from all the Christopher Guest movies. And Bruce Willis, for some reason—Bruce Willis, that well-known voice actor, who keeps getting cast in action films because of his voice." Add that to the fact that it seemed for all the world to have nothing whatsoever to do with the strip of the same name—same character names, granted, but none of the same artistic style or character motivations or air of bored, wacky cynicism (which is a great trick if you can pull it off), and I was expecting to see an uninspired, frenetic, morally heavy-handed fable about the urban blight that is suburban sprawl.
But while the moralizing was indeed there, it never really had time to get too thick about the ankles, because—to my great pleasant surprise—the story turned out to be rich enough and engaging enough to attract all the viewer's attention onto itself. The characters were well-developed and believable. The gags were usually dead on target (the laser pointer scene was particularly masterfully pulled off). The star power wasn't wasted. And what I found to be the biggest indicator of how far Dreamworks has come in recent years is that the final twenty minutes of the movie featured more callbacks to little bits of foreshadowing that had been hinted at earlier in the story than I think I'd ever seen before; whether it was a berry on a branch, or a caffeine gag, or a "playing possum" bit, or a bout of clowning with a turtle shell, every last thing came back for an encore that managed to fit into the unfolding of the plot's resolution. While it's true that too much of that sort of thing can feel like the writers are simply trying too hard, in this case it felt like gorging oneself on way too much pilfered junk food: yeah, I'll probably regret it later, but it sure tastes good now.
I think that's what Dreamworks is doing at this stage, as a matter of fact: trying to prove to all comers that they're the equal of Pixar in the storytelling arena. Shrek was good, and so were Shrek 2 and Madagascar—but from traditional animated fare like Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and The Road to El Dorado to their PDI-animated 3D films like Antz and Shark Tale, they've had a tough time proving their stuff could seriously compete with Disney's or Pixar's. Even when their stories were good, they often failed as spectacularly as Disney did in its later years in wooing a merchandise-buying young public. The Prince of Egypt and Spirit haven't done much better than Atlantis or The Emperor's New Groove in attracting franchises. Over the Hedge, it seems, is aiming to change all that, at whatever cost is necessary.
The trick lies in having fun with the story. And while it's indeed true that all the throw-and-catch plot-point callbacks did seem to cluster a little bit too thickly by the time the credits rolled, I found it to be more out of the writers' genuine enjoyment of the material than out of an obsessive need to prove themselves worthy and to strike before the almost impossibly-highly-hyped Cars hits screens this summer. My evidence, such as it is, is all the geeky and injokey stuff they did during the credits sequence: direct callouts to all the animation units as each one is listed by name (the "Lighting" group, for example, being heralded by the characters showing up in gray unrendered model form and wearing sunglasses, then after the screen flashes white they're all standing there with all their shaders applied as in the final render). Very clever, and clearly the result of artists who really enjoy what they're doing.
Maybe they're just faking it really well. But I like to think this is the real deal. And good on Dreamworks, then, for being real live competition—the stuff that's more than anything else going to force Pixar to have to scramble to stay on top.
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Brian Tiemann
