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| NY Times Goes Back to 'OTH | 09/05/06, 10:08pm EST
| Over the Hedge," the new feature from DreamWorks Animation, began more than 10 years ago, when a morning newspaper came over the hedge at Jim Cox's house in the woodsy Rustic Canyon area of Los Angeles.
Mr. Cox, the film's co-executive producer, had written "Ferngully: The Last Rain Forest" and worked on Disney's "Beauty and the Beast." He was taken with a new comic strip written by Michael Fry and drawn by T Lewis. In "Over the Hedge," RJ, a sardonic, junk-food-loving raccoon, and Verne, a cautious, sensitive turtle, stumbled into an upscale development and tried to understand the human behavior they observed.
"Like 'Toy Story,' it offered a great secret world that exists just outside our awareness," Mr. Cox explained in a recent telephone interview. "What happens to the wild animals in suburbia that you only see in fleeting glimpses?"
The next step was surprisingly simple: "Over the Hedge" was one of the first comic strips to include an e-mail address, so Mr. Cox sent a message to the creators, suggesting they collaborate.
"Jim sent a message introducing himself and asking, 'Do you want to make a movie?' " Mr. Fry recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Buda, Tex. "So we Googled him, he passed the test, and T called him. That was in March 1996; we spent the summer coming up with the story, and we pitched it that fall."
Although several studios liked the pitch, the journey to the completed film — as happens in Hollywood — proved more complicated than the artists anticipated. Fox bought the idea and discussed various ways to make the movie: real animals with computer-animated mouths, as in "Babe"; computer-animated characters in a live action world, as in "Garfield"; drawn animation; stop-motion animation.
Eventually, interest at Fox waned. But "unknown to us, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who'd been interested in the project from the beginning, was waiting on the sidelines," said Mr. Fry. "When it became available again in 2000, he grabbed it and immediately put it into production."
The first problem DreamWorks artists faced was expanding the cast. Since its inception, "Over the Hedge" has essentially been a two-character strip. The continuing dialogue between RJ and Verne works in short daily installments. But a feature film needs supporting players — and they would have to be invented, even while adapting Mr. Lewis's calligraphic drawings to the three-dimensional computer graphics that are a DreamWorks signature.
In a phone interview from Skywalker Ranch, where he was overseeing the final sound mix, Tim Johnson, one of the film's two directors, said: "T did hundreds of drawings of new species. Some of them became prominent characters in the film. Others, including Ratso the weasel and Norbert the owl, ended up on the cutting-room floor."
Three-dimensional versions of the characters, Mr. Johnson said, never lost their kinship to the more abstract style of the strip. "In silhouette, the designs are very similar to his original drawings: the general proportions, the relative sizes of the heads and bodies, the length of the arms," he explained.
One of the trickiest aspects of adapting a comic strip to the screen is casting the voices, because each reader hears the characters differently in his head. Mr. Cox originally wanted Bill Murray and Harold Ramis to play RJ and Verne. Jim Carrey was later set to portray RJ, but dropped out because of scheduling conflicts. The filmmakers ultimately cast Bruce Willis as RJ and Garry Shandling as Verne.
"The rascally charm Bruce Willis brought to 'Moonlighting' makes RJ a lovable rogue, or at least a likable one," said the other director, Karey Kirkpatrick, whose credits include the screenplay for "Chicken Run." "Even when he's putting one over on you, he shouldn't feel malicious — he can't help himself."
Mr. Fry added: "Garry Shandling has the right nebbishy sound for Verne. He's insecure, but he gets in these little wisecracks on the side."
After a decade of production and a change of studio, "Over the Hedge" still tells the story the artists devised in 1996: how Verne and RJ established the friendship at the core of the strip. "We all wanted to tell the pre-story: how RJ, the carpe diem raccoon, met Verne, the worried turtle," said Mr. Johnson, who also directed "Antz" for DreamWorks. "We watched classic con-man pictures, including 'The Music Man,' 'The Rainmaker' and 'Elmer Gantry,' to help us find the right tone for the film."
As Mr. Kirkpatrick sees it, there is nothing unusual about turning to Robert Preston and Burt Lancaster for a bit of cartoon inspiration.
"The unholy alliance is a tried-and-true format that includes everything from Buzz and Woody to 'The Defiant Ones' and '48 Hours,' " he explained. "You always look for the chance to throw a couple of opposites at each other, as the conflicts create the best comedic situations: Verne meets his polar opposite, the impetuous, impulsive RJ. The Lucys and RJ's of the world enjoy riling up the Ethels and Vernes, who need to quit taking life so seriously. Ultimately, each has something to learn from the other."
Source: NYTimes |
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