Author: Ryan Ball

Over the Hedge, the latest computer-generated critter comedy from DreamWorks Animation, arrives in theaters today, just in time to compete with director Ron Howard’s adaptation of the controversial best seller The Da Vinci Code. Both films will make a ton of money for sure, but it will be interesting to see which one emerges victorious when the dust from this scuffle clears. Will auds be more intrigued by what’s on the other side of the hedge, or what secrets the Catholic church is hiding from Tom Hanks?

Some critics have already chosen a winner in Hedge. The flick has garnered several positive reviews while the word on Code has been pretty grim. Still, Dan Brown’s book about hidden messages in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci has become a cultural phenomenon and its heat should generate a fire at the box office for Sony’s pic. Over the Hedge has the advantage of the highest theater count. The toon rolls out in more the 4,000 theaters in North America, while The Da Vinci Code debuts in just over 3,700 venues.

Also opening in wide release today is See No Evil, Lions Gate’s most recent attempt to cash in on the lucrative teen horror genre. But with just 1,257 theaters screening the screamer, it shouldn’t pose much of a threat to the two top contenders, It may, however, help push the Fox Animation/Blue Sky Studios hit, Ice Age: The Meltdown, out of the top ten after a successful eight weeks on the charts.

Based on the comic strip of the same name by Michael Fry and T. Lewis, Over the Hedge finds a raccoon named R.J. (Bruce Willis) with a literal deadline of one week to replace an ominous bear’s spring food supply. In order to complete the task, he recruits a small band of forest animals to loot a housing development that has cropped up over the winter. Like the comic, the movie offers a satirical look a suburban life and how the animal world might view the absurdity of human excess.

Over the Hedge is directed by Tim Johnson (Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, Antz) and first-timer Karey Kirkpatrick, a writer whose credits include The Rescuers Down Under, James and the Giant Peach, Chicken Run and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Read our thoughts on the animated family film at www.animationmagazine.net/article.php?article_id=5443 and head over to Barnes & Noble and other newsstand locations to pick up the June issue of Animation Magazine for a behind-the-scenes look at the DreamWorks Animation production.

Mike Johnson, co-director of the Oscar-nominated animated feature Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, is replacing Triplets of Belleville helmer Sylvain Chomet as director of Universal Pictures’ The Tale of Despereaux. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Chomet dropped out when his attempt to juggle two films at once proved unmanageable. He is currently adapting a screenplay by late French scribe and actor Jacques Tati (Parade, Trafic).

Universal’s animated feature is based on the Newberry Medal-winning children’s book, The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread by Kate DiCamillo (Because of Winn-Dixie). Screenwriters Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi adapted the story, which centers on a mouse that falls in love with a princess and discovers a thirst for knowledge while other mice are eating books.

Seabiscuit director Gary Ross and Allison Thomas are producing the film through their Larger Than Life Prods, and Mary Parent and Damien Saccani are overseeing the project for Universal. London-based visual effects and animation house Framestore CFC is handling the CG animation. Johnson is reportedly working with the studio to build on character designs started by Chomet.

Before co-directing Corpse Bride with Burton, Johnson served as an animator on the stop-motion features The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, which were both produed by Burton and directed by Henry Selick. He also directed Vinton Studio’s short-lived, clay-animated FOX series, The PJs, before founding Fat Cactus Films In 1996 and producing the short film The Devil Went Down to Georgia.

IDT Ent. has announced that its West Coast headquarters in Burbank, Calif. has begun production on a new CG-animated feature film titled Sheepish. Putting a comic twist on the old ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ concept, the movie will be animated at IDT Ent.’s toon studio in Toronto and distributed by 20th Century Fox. The news follows this week’s announcement that IDT Ent. is being acquired by Liberty Media, which will use the company to produce animated content for its Starz Entertainment Group.

Sheepish will revolve around a wolf named Logan, who pays the ultimate price when he violates an age-old covenant that protects a particular flock of sheep. Logan is himself transformed into a sheep and has to learn to get along with his natural prey, who in turn teach him to be a better wolf.

The team of Saul Blinkoff and Elliott Bour (Disney’s Kronk’s New Groove, Winnie the Pooh in Springtime With Roo) are directing the film from an original idea and script by Bart Coughlin, a character technical director whose credits include the DreamWorks toon features Antz, Shrek, Shark Tale and the upcoming Flushed Away and Bee Movie. In addition to directing the animated MTV series Spy Groove, Blinkoff and Bour worked as animators on the Disney classics Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan and Tarzan. IDT Ent.’s Morris Berger, Stephen R. Brown, Janet Healy and Jerry Davis are exec producers.

IDT Ent. has several animated films in production at their animation facilities in Burbank, Toronto, and Vancouver. The Toronto crew is finishing Everyone’s Hero, the film that actor Christopher Reeve was directing at the time of his death. Dan St. Pierre and Colin Brady have taken over directing duties on the tale of an ordinary boy who takes a chance and decides to take heroic actions, despite overwhelming odds. He is accompanied by a feisty little girl and an eclectic group of sidekicks in his cross-county journey to restore his family’s honor and discover the hero within. Rob Reiner, Whoopi Goldberg, Brian Dennehy, Raven Symone, William H. Macy, Mandy Patinkin, Robert Wagner, Richard Kind, New York Yankees Manager Joe Torre, Jake T. Austin and the late Dana Reeve lend their voices to the pic, which is produced by Ron Tippe and Igor Khait, and exec produced by Christopher and Dana Reeve, Stephen R. Brown, Morris Berger, Jerry Davis and Janet Healy. Twentieth Century Fox will release the film nationwide on Sept. 15.

Also in the works is the CG-animated feature film Space Chimps. An IDT Ent. presentation of a Vanguard Animation film, the comedy that follows the galactic misadventures of a hapless descendant of the first chimps in space. The family flick is being put together in Vancouver with Vanguard founder and producer John Williams (Shrek, Valiant) producing. Morris Berger, Stephen R. Brown, Janet Healy, Jerry Davis, Eric Bennett and Neil Braun are exec producers.

As its latest CG-animated feature, Over the Hedge, gets set to debut in theaters on Friday, DreamWorks Animation has released the compete trailer for the upcoming toon Flushed Away. The promo will be shown in theaters prior to Hedge, but curious animation fans can first check it out online at the Apple site (www.apple.com/trailers/dreamworks/flushedaway).

Co-produced by U.K. animation house Aardman Animaitons, Flushed Away stars Hugh Jackman as the voice of Roddy, a highrise-dwelling fat rat who leaves the posh life when he gets flushed down the toilet and into the sewer where he makes new friends and learns how the other half lives. Kate Winslet is Rita, a tough-as-nails sewer boat driver who captures Roddy’s heart and Sir Ian Mckellen is the frog villain, Toad. The voice cast also includes Andy Serkis, Bill Nighy and Shane Ritchie.

The CG-anmated film marks a departure for Aardman, whose previous big-screen outings with DreamWorks, Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, were animated with stop-motion using characters created from plasticine clay. Thought digitally realized, the animal stars of Flushed Away will look familiar to Aardman fans since the studio chose to model the characters like they would in clay rather than going for more photo-real designs.

Flushed Away is directed by Sam Fell and David Bowers from a script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. The film arrives in theaters on Nov. 3.

Like others I’ve talked to, I was a bit leery going into the advance screening of Over the Hedge. While I’m generally a big fan of the work done by Katzenberg and crew, I wondered if my interest in cute animal pics had reached saturation point, and was sure that the film would pale in comparison to the studio’s last release, the brilliant Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Despite these reservations, I had a darn good time with this film and encourage others who may be sitting on the fence, or hedge as the case may be, to take the plunge.

Directed by Tim Johnson (Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas) and first-timer Karey Kirkpatrick, (who has writer’s credit on The Rescuers Down Under, James and the Giant Peach, Chicken Run and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) Over the Hedge is based on the comic strip of the same name by Michael Fry and T Lewis. The film centers on a group of animal pals who awake for hibernation to find that humans have built a suburban housing development around their natural habitat. As they struggle to cope with their new situation, the critters find a new, fearless leader in R.J., a raccoon voiced by Bruce Willis. The manipulative R.J. convinces the others to go over the hedge and collect food so he can repay a fearsome bear voiced beautifully by Nick Nolte.

Unlike Disney’s Chicken Little, which never realized the full potential of a great voice cast, Hedge delivers a winning combination of vocal and animated performances. Willis is in fine form as the classic anti-hero, a loner who acts only out of self-interest until he discovers something more important. In his best scene, he delivers some biting social satire on the American way of life, pointing out the absurdity of everything from SUVs to our obsession with food.

With his slow, somewhat whiny delivery, Gary Shandling is perfectly cast as Verne the turtle, but it’s Steve Carell who steals the show as a squirrel named Hammy. Thanks to brilliant execution by the animation team at DreamWorks’ Glendale studio and PDI in Redwood City, the character has one truly inspired scene that alone garners a recommendation for the entire film. Other fine performances are turned in by Wanda Sykes, William Shatner, Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, to name a few.

Animation and design of the human characters leave something to be desired, but the bipeds mainly serve as comic foils and aren’t given a whole lot of screen time. Allison Janney from TV’s The West Wing is the voice of Gladys Sharp, the tyrannical president of the homeowner’s association, who tries to get rid of the animals by calling in an over-zealous exterminator voiced by Thomas Hayden Church of Sideways fame.

I’m quickly becoming a big fan of Tim Johnson. I’m apparently in the minority of people who thoroughly enjoyed Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, which featured great staging and execution of action sequences. The same can be said for Over the Hedge, which manages to deliver some exciting, elaborately designed set pieces without taking audiences to the point of exhaustion. The film also features some sharp writing by co-director Kirkpatrick, Len Blum, Lorne Cameron and David Hoselton. Pop-culture references are kept to a minimum and the characters are ones that I’d gladly dive over the hedge to revisit in a sequel.

Over the Hedge opens in theaters Friday, May 19. Let writer Barbara Robertson take you behind the scenes for a look at the making of the film in the June issue of Animation Magazine, now available at Barnes & Noble locations and other fine booksellers.

Daily Variety reports that Focus Features has inked a deal with Laika Ent. to distribute Coraline, the flagship feature film from the company formerly known as Vinton Studio. Based on the best-selling novel by Neil Gaiman, the film will employ stop-motion animation and the voice of child star Dakota Fanning to tell the story of a young girl who moves with her family into a new home and discovers a door that leads to an alternate reality.

Coraline is being directed by Laika supervising director Henry Selick, whose directorial credits include the stop-motion classics The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. Mike Cachuela, a storyboard and conceptual artist whose credits include The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Incredibles, is co-directing the pic for producers Bill Mechanic of Pandemonium Films and Laika’s Mary Sandell. Original songs are being written by esoteric rock band They Might Be Giants.

Owned by Nike co-founder Phil Knight, Oregon-based Laika was peripherally involved in Warner Bros. Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, and its CG-animated short, Selick’s Moongirl, won the Short Film Special Jury Prize at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Also in the pipeline at the Jack & Ben’s Animated Adventure, an original idea from Laika’s director of story, Jorgen Klubien. Described as a tale of survival, brotherly love and grand adventure set in the animal kingdom, the family film is being written and directed by Klubien, who lists among his credits The Lion King, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

In the latest round of release-date musical chairs, Disney and Walden Media have pushed back the theatrical bow of their next Chronicles of Narnia movie, while 20th Century Fox jockeys for an earlier release for its sequel to the blockbuster superhero flick, Fantastic Four. Both vfx-driven franchises have earned a lot of money at the box office and their respective studios are being careful to keep the tent poles raised high.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which was originally scheduled to debut on Dec. 14, 2007, has been moved back half a year and will instead compete with the summer releases of 2008. Disney reportedly made the switch to avoid competition from Columbia Pictures’ fantasy flick, The Water Horse. Slated for release on Dec. 14, 2007, that film will center on a lonely boy who discovers an unusual egg and hatches a sea creature of Scottish legend. Shrek director Andrew Adamson, who helmed the first jouney to Narnia, is currently shooting the followup.

Rather than delivering some cinematic fireworks next 4th of July, Fantastic Four 2 moves up to June 15, 2007. The first film opened last July and ended up earning more than $330 million worldwide despite lackluster reviews. Director Tim Story (Barbershop) and the four main cast members are attached to return for the second installment in the Marvel Comics screen adaptation.

Having conquered the world of animation with a 4 KidsTV series and a line of direct-to-DVD features, MGA Ent.’s best-selling girls’ lifestyle brand, BRATZ, is being adapted as a live-action theatrical feature. The endeavor has teamed MGA with Avi Arad Prods. and Crystal Sky Pictures, who have commissioned a screenplay and plan to start production in Los Angeles in late fall of 2006.

Tentatively titled BRATZ, the feature will be financed by Crystal Sky Pictures. MGA’s Isaac Larian, Crystal Sky’s Steven Paul and Arad will produce with Crystal Sky Pictures president Benedict Carver serving as exec producer.

Arad, who is also president of Marvel Ent. and producer of such blockbusters as the Spider-Man franchise, says the doll industry was one of his first loves. “BRATZ allows me to revisit the girl’s business,’ he comments. ‘The BRATZ attitude and character will make an exciting and inspirational live-action feature.”

Crystal Sky founder Paul, creator of the Baby Geniuses franchise, is also working with Arad and Marvel Studios on the major motion picture Ghost Rider, based on a Marvel comic and starring Nicholas Cage. Directed by Mark Steven Johnson (Daredevil), the film about a motorcycle stunt driver turned supernatural avenger is currently in post-production. Also in the works at Crystal Sky is a Rob Schneider comedy titled Big Stan.

Since launching in June of 2001 with a line of fashion dolls, BRATZ has become one of the world’s leading girls’ lifestyle brands, boasting more than 400 licensees worldwide. The toys, video games and various other consumer products are distributed in more than 65 countries. For more information go to www.mgae.com and http://www.bratz.com.