Two nights ago Charles and I watched a surprisingly entertaining movie, Hop – billed as “by the creators of Despicable Me” (the director was Tim Hill and the writers were Cinco Paul – I inevitably joked about whether the movie would have been any different if his brother Quatro Paul had worked on it, and Charles said, “How about their father, Tertius Secunda – or their uncle we never talk about, Octavian Primus?” – Ken Daurio and Brian Lynch) and what turned out to be a charming little fantasy, partially live action and partially computer-animated, in which virtually all the armamentarium of the Santa Claus mythos was thrown at a quite different holiday: Easter, not Christmas. It begins with a prologue set 20 years before the main action, in which a young suburban boy named Fred O'Hare (Coleton Ray) sees the Easter Bunny arrive on his parents' front lawn in a space-age craft that looks like a cross between Santa's sleigh and a moon rocket and drop candy all over the lawn before he departs again. Then the film moves to the present, where the Easter Bunny (Hugh Laurie) is getting old for the gig of depositing candy on the lawns of all the boys and girls in the world (unlike Santa, there's no particular hint about this supernatural visitor making lists and checking them twice of who's been naughty and who's been nice) and he wants to turn the reins over to his son, E.B. (Russell Brand, who in addition to voicing the character also appears on screen as a backstage minion for a talent contest saying, “Is there somebody here named Eb?”).
Only E.B. doesn't want
to become the Easter Bunny. What he does
want is to escape from Easter Island (where the Easter Bunny has his
candy factory and the entrance is concealed inside one of the famous
Easter Island statues) and head out to Hollywood to make his fortune
as a rock 'n' roll drummer. He makes his escape, all right, via a
network of subterranean rabbit holes that undergirds the entire
planet, but he soon finds out that there's no such thing as
overnight fame. He also runs into Fred O'Hare (James Marsden), now a late-teen
slacker who's just been thrown out of his parents' house (it's staged
deliberately like a substance-abuse intervention in one of the most
grimly funny parts of the film!) and would be reduced to sleeping in
his car were it not for the secret help of his sister Samantha (Kaley
Cuoco), who's given him a line on a place he can stay: a huge mansion
she's supposed to be house-sitting, only she can't stand the dogs
that come with the place (and whom Fred is instructed to put on a
padded suit before feeding – a precaution well worth taking, as we
soon learn). She warns Fred that he's not supposed to venture into
the upstairs part of the house (what's up there, we wonder – the
owner's S/M dungeon where he's keeping underage sex slaves?), but on
his way there Fred runs into E.B. – literally, with
his car – and naturally E.B. won't leave. E.B. blows Fred's job
interview for a mail-room position at a video game company, and when
Fred tries to abandon him E.B. puts on the sob-sister act and gets
Fred to relent.
Later E.B. himself heads out on his way and discovers
the audition for the show Hoff's Got Talent!,
a reality series hosted by David Hasselhoff (playing himself), and
after a long sequence of auditioners who are even weirder than a
talking rabbit – there's a nice bit in which E.B. asks “Hoff”
if he's cool with a talking rabbit, and Hoff responds, “Why not? My
best friend is a talking car” – he scores a shot at the show.
Only in the meantime Fred has been kidnapped by the Pink Berets, the
security detail of the Easter Bunny's operation, and underground in
the Easter Island location Fred and the Easter Bunny are both being
held hostage by Carlos (Hank Azaria), the long-suffering
second-in-command Easter chicken (the chicks who are basically the
Easter Island proletariat are made to look like Peeps candies) who's
decided it's time for the poultry to take over and dethrone the
rabbits from control of Easter. It all ends well, of course: E.B.
starts drumming and gets Carlos's assistant Phil (also Hank Azaria)
to dance, thereby distracting the chickens, while Fred realizes that
the ropes with which he and the Easter Bunny, Sr. are bound are black
licorice (“We can eat right through them!” Fred explains – to
which E.B., Sr. replies, “You
can eat through them. I can't stand the taste of them!” As someone
who's never liked
licorice, I could relate to that – I hated it as a child, and when
I read years later that Charlie Chaplin had the prop shoe he ate in
The Gold Rush made of
licorice because he
couldn't stand the taste of it and therefore he'd have no trouble
looking like he was eating something repulsive, I felt a kinship to
his spirit). Fred eats through his own ropes, he unties E.B., Sr.,
and he and E.B., Jr. are eventually appointed co-Easter Bunnies and
they do the candy run together. (This outcome was actually
telegraphed in the early parts of the movie, and frankly I thought it
would have been better if it hadn't been and it had come as a
surprise.)
Hop is the
sort of movie that not only is largely derived from older movies but
wears its derivations with almost perverse pride – its debt to
Santa Claus movies in general and The Santa Clause
in particular is obvious, the Easter candy factory is right out of
both versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
(so much so I half expected a line of dialogue indicating that Fred
had won admission to it by finding a Golden Ticket inside a candy
bar!) and there are the almost inevitable borrowings from The
Wizard of Oz as well as a far
less inevitable borrowing from another project involving Judy
Garland: the Pink Berets couldn't help but remind me of the villain's
minions, the Money-Cats, from Gay Purr-ee
(though the Pink Berets are mute – even the Money-Cats got to sing
a cool Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg song!). Also, Hop
suffers from an inverse concession to the Ratings Board: in an era in
which the G rating is a commercial kiss of death (today's children
regard G-rated movies as terminally boring even before they see
them), the filmmakers stretched to include enough “mild rude humor”
to score a PG (including the most obnoxious gag in the film, in which
E.B. shits out great-tasting candy drops). Still, Hop
is a lot of fun – and any movie that features the Blind Boys of
Alabama doing their great cover of Stevie Wonder's “Higher Ground”
(with E.B. sitting in on drums) can't be all bad ...
