DreamWorks’ Over the Hedge is unlike the competition: it manages to translate a property from another medium without destroying its spirit or alienating its creators. All images courtesy DreamWorks Animation SKG.

DreamWorks’ Over the Hedge, the latest star-powered CGI entry in 2006’s animated feature sweepstakes, opens this Friday on the heels of Fox’s Ice Age 2 and just ahead of Pixar’s Cars. Unlike the films bracketing it, Hedge is adapted from a pre-existing work — an 11-year old daily comicstrip featuring a cast of funny-animal characters observing and interacting with suburban sprawl and American consumerist culture.

The film succeeds in a rare-for-Hollywood balancing act — translating a property from another medium without destroying its spirit or alienating its creators — perhaps because they were heavily involved from the film’s conception. And while the strip’s critters have made the leap from newsprint to pixels, Hedge the movie is a different animal from Hedge the strip — a number of different animals, as a matter of fact.

Over the Hedge was born in 1995, the brainchild of writer/cartoonist Michael Fry and children’s book illustrator T Lewis. The pair had worked together on King Features’ Mickey Mouse comicstrip and tried to launch The Secret Life of Pigs, a strip of their own. “We thought it was destined for cosmic greatness,” Lewis recounts, “two pigs on a farm secretly observing humanity. We were told ‘it’s a great idea, but nobody likes pigs.’ Then Babe came out.”

Fry and Lewis tried again. They replaced the pigs with a trio of suburban animals — suave raccoon RJ, worrywart turtle Verne and manic squirrel Hammy. Instead of a barn, the critters lived on the outskirts of a suburban development rich in wasteful consumption and human absurdity. The retooled strip was snapped up by United Features Syndicate and today runs in some 250 newspapers, but back in ’95 it caught the eye of animation producer/writer Jim Cox. Cox, whose credits go back to Oliver & Company and include story development on Beauty and the Beast (and now co-producer of the Over the Hedge movie) contacted the pair via the e-mail address wedged between the strip’s panels.

A partnership was quickly born. Cox, Fry and Lewis put a pitch together and made the studio rounds. According to Lewis, “Fox, Henson and DreamWorks were the most interested. A bidding war actually broke out, we were really rooting for DreamWorks — look at the personalities involved, c'mon. Fox ultimately won, the power of sheer money won. It was only a year or two after DreamWorks formed and they were not able to throw the money around that Fox was back then.”

The project wound up on Fox’s shelf and stayed there — much to the frustration of Tim Johnson, its ultimate co-director. “I was aware of it, I knew it was sitting there. It was making me crazy. Even eight years ago when I was making Antz, I knew Over the Hedge was there and just the seed of a fantastic film. I loved the characters and the opportunity to comment on suburban living. When Fox let the option expire in 2001 we grabbed it at DreamWorks and put it in development right away.”

Michael Fry (left) and T Lewis are the creators of the comic strip Over the Hedge, and also served as creative consultants for the film.

Rumor has it that when Fox optioned Hedge, DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg predicted, “those people will never make that movie, and when they don’t, I will.” Lewis attributes Fox’s failure to make the film to the fact that “Hollywood is wiggly — everything is always changing. We had a champion who brought us into Fox, Jon Jashni [most recently exec producer of the Poseidon remake]. Then he got shuffled somewhere. In a big studio system like Fox, as opposed to a boutique operation like DreamWorks, when you lose your champion, you pretty much get lost.

“We were at Fox when there was a lot of wringing of hands — ‘What’s going to happen to family films, what’s going to happen to animation?’ They were trying to break in with Anastasia and we were sort of this odd little duck. It was actually pitched back then as a Babe-like thing, where we were going to have live-action and then the animals would be computer generated, kind of like Garfield. When we came on board at DreamWorks for a month or two we were thinking Hedge was going to be a 2D movie. At one point they were talking about claymation because they had this contract with Aardman. Ultimately those were just ‘run it up the flagpole’ ideas.”

The original Fox story pitch (which Lewis describes as a series of set pieces “more or less strung together”) was refined into a “how it all began” tale, recounting RJ’s first meeting with Verne and the ‘blended family’ of animals he looks after — the excitable Hammy, a porcupine couple and their kids, a father and daughter opossum pair and a lady skunk with serious self-image issues. Other than Hammy, it’s an extended family that doesn’t exist in the comicstrip, whipped up for the purposes of the film’s feature-length narrative.

“The new characters are fine with us,” says Lewis. “We totally understand this was a story beyond the comicstrip and you had to add stuff. When we pitched the script early on we had this clan of animals — wasn’t exactly as it is now, but we had come up with more animals too, realizing the story more or less dictated it.”