Red Carpet? Pah. When you’re heralding the arrival of Dreamwork’s new animated feature, only a green carpet and some rather fetching foliage will do. The Bruce Willis-led Over The Hedge premiered last night in London and alongside a raccoon, a turtle and a squirrel, the stars who lent their voices to the movie skipped happily down the shrub-lined path, eager to vent their enthusiasm for the creature caper.
The film tells the tale of a group of woodland animals (voices include Steve Carrell, Garry Shandling, William Shatner, Nick Nolte and former Sk8er Girl Avril Lavigne) who awake from hibernation to discover that suburban sprawl has viciously encroached onto their home turf. Led by RJ the raccoon (voiced by Willis in his ‘Mikey from Look Who’s Talking’ guise), it’s now their quest to find enough food for the winter.
Greeted by a swarming mass of fans and photographers, Willis and Dreamwork’s head-honcho Jeffrey Katzenburg were the first to arrive. The pair insisted on leaping into the air together for their photographs before sauntering over to Empire for a natter.
“This film has something for everyone” gushed Katzenburg: “There’s some wicked humour for the adults, but there’s also something in there for all the family.” This is a sentiment Willis wholeheartedly shares: “My kids have all seen the movie and they gave it six thumbs up. It’s such a fun movie, it’s really easy to talk about and it’s always great to return to comedy.” It was, of course, in 80s sitcom Moonlighting that Willis made his name, starring opposite Cybill Shepherd as the lovable private eye David Addison, a character Willis re-visited for this role, “He’s definitely in the character of RJ. All the preparation I did for the film didn’t work, so I brought some of Addison into the mix”.
He was not alone – many of the actor’s own personalities and previous roles seeped into the dialogue. As Director/Screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick (Chicken Run, The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy) was keen to express, this was very much a production that encouraged improvisation: “I wasn’t precious about the words. We’d put a line down and push the actor to top it if they could. In fact, I would say a quarter of the lines in Over The Hedge are ad-libbed. We’d spend a lot of time listening to the voices in the editing room, so we’d get to know them extremely well. Sometimes we’d have to ask Bruce to pitch his voice up. When he gets low, he sounds really menacing, like he’s trying to save the world…again.”
Over The Hedge opens across the UK next Friday (June 30).