Over The Hedge: Critic Reviews

The voice acting is delightful.

No doubt the people at DreamWorks who made Over the Hedge would prefer that their film bring to mind animated classics like Disney's Bambi (or, as Hammy suggests, Ice Age), but no such luck.

There's a moderate amount of fun to be had.

A raucous, funny and fresh look at the 3 C's: conservation, consumerism and consumption (of the excessive and conspicuous kind).

Hums along with such well-greased precision, you can almost hear the industrial cogs and wheels whirring in all their viscous complexity. There's such a knowing swagger about the film's comedy, there seems to be no innocence in the mix at all.

The filmmakers are obviously concerned about the rise of exurbs, but they shrug off the issue and stick to the formula of a talking-critters script instead.

It feels like I've already seen Over the Hedge four times, after witnessing the parade of commercials for other junk its characters are pimping.

The computer-animation is terrific, most of the slapstick gags are fun, and Wanda Sykes' voice performance as feisty Stella the Skunk is one that will be remembered -- and not because it stinks.

An endearingly cheerful animated feature from DreamWorks.

Its own animal, a spirited and intrepid critter that mooches our affection along with the garbage.

Visually energetic and light on its feet, it's frothy entertainment that has some ideas in its head and a sense of playfulness that turns those ideas into a speedily pleasant 90 minutes.

Intelligent jokes are set up and paid off, rather than blurred by an endless string of instantly-outdated pop culture references.

The story has a loony, slapstick verve, and the star-studded voice work is uniformly entertaining.

A feature cartoon that is not at the level of Finding Nemo or Shrek, but is a lot of fun, awfully nice to look at, and filled with energy and smiles.

The critters and the humans here resemble metallic, robotic alternate-universe images of animals and people.

The final showdown, in which the critters tangle with security-rigged lawn flamingos and garden gnomes, would have made Rube Goldberg proud.

Over the Hedge isn't by any stretch bad. It's just banal.

A nicely crafted charmer.

Ultimately Hedge is deja vu all over again, a computer-generated work of wonder that could have come out last year, last month or two months from now, a film so reminiscent of other films it almost immediately dims in the memory.

The movie delivers on the broad comedy, but the small moments are what really put Over the Hedge over the top.

A rather narrowly conceived tale that makes only modest hay from the overworked conflict between wildlife and encroaching humans.

If they were still making Looney Tunes, they'd look a lot like Over the Hedge.

Over the Hedge may be 'just' a cartoon. But it's also a biting and funny jab at SUV-MSG Nation.

It is competent work and frequently amusing.

There may be only so many ways you can spin a computer-generated animated feature about a gang of animals and their grand project against an evil adversary.