Films: Hop

Hop
Reviewer: Wally
Director: Tim Hill
Released: 2011
Rating: U
Popcorns: 2/5

E.B., the Easter Bunny's teenage son, heads to Hollywood, determined to become a drummer in a rock 'n' roll band. In LA, he's taken in by Fred after the out-of-work slacker hits E.B. with his car.

With Tim Hill being the nephew of the late, great George Roy Hill; director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, to name but a few, you would expect him to follow in his footsteps and not just churn out poor animation films like Garfield 2 and Alvin and the Chipmunks.  Poor George would be turning in his grave.

Hop really isn't much of an exception to this.  It's got nothing to make it stand out of the crowd of animation/live action mash ups we've been bombarded with in the past few years.
It did, however, keep me entertained enough over the 95min running time to not turn it off, although my fingered hovered heavily over the eject button when everyone broke out into an impromptu song and dance routine in the middle of the film.  Unless it's King Julien doing 'I like to move it, move it' in Madagascar, then I'm not interested!

The basic premise is that the Easter Bunny (Hugh Laurie) is trying to train up his son to follow in his footsteps, whilst the rebel son, voiced by the hairy and flamboyant Russell Brand, has better ideas of going into the real world and wreaking havoc, trying to start a rock band.  Something along those lines anyway.
Brand was pretty funny in it for the most part, while his human sidekick, played by James Marsden was unfunny and a douche. Oh how far you've come from playing Cyclops in X-Men!

A redeeming feature was the quality of the animation playing along side the live action sets.  They seemed to get all the reflections correct on surfaces and the interaction between characters was spot on.  Also, I found myself LOLing at least 5 times during the film. That works out to about a LOL every 19 minutes, or 0.05 of a LOL per minute. Actually, that's a pretty poor minute to LOL ratio!

I fear I may have written more about this than Blue Valentine.  If you are a child, see this.  If you are anything but, see Blue Valentine, or most other films for that matter.  It was OK, and that was all.

As for Tim Hill...Shame on you for putting your name down to direct the Short Circuit remake in 2013. I spit in your general direction!