Starring the voices of Bruce Willis, Garry Shandling, Steve Carell, William Shatner, and Wanda Sykes.

I have neither children nor a stake in DreamWorks Animation nor a comic-book stash under my futon. Yet I loved Over the Hedge's fleshed-out, vibrant characters so much that when one misjudged critter softly pleaded that he wasn't “stupid” , I welled up more than when Ennis dropped in on Jack's parents in Brokeback Mountain.

Serving as the cinematic prequel to the suburbia-lampooning comic strip of the same name, this delightful animated film chronicles the exploits of RJ the raccoon and the forest creatures he cons into raiding the fridges of greedy yuppies living beyond an enormous hedge.

Predictably, Over the Hedge incorporates the morality lessons that are de rigueur in children's movies. Fortunately, the flick also respects adults' mental-mush thresholds. It achieves this by doing something that's unnecessary in cartoons with adorable lion cubs, baby fish, and mermaids representing childhood innocence: it assembles all the weird-looking, prickly, slow, stinky, and scaly protagonists to whom we'd sooner take a broom than a shine and dignifies them. As a flawed adult, I identify.

Not all the celebrity voice-over artists are recognizable here, and that's refreshing too. Bruce Willis's RJ is a dead ringer for a doting dad softly reading a bedtime story, and all but Steve Carell's mega-talent disappears within Hammy, the showstopping, manic squirrel. However, the undisguisable William Shatner as Avril Lavigne's melodramatic possum papa, Garry Shandling's whiny turtle, Wanda Sykes's ranting skunk, and Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara's folksy porcupine couple ring pleasingly familiar. But it was while watching Allison Janney and Thomas Haden Church's “freaky pink primates”  trying to exterminate our scavenging critters that the film's deeper meaning became obvious: the shrubbery was intended as a metaphor for the Canada–U.S. border, erected to hold back our comparatively naive, envious, and misunderstood Canadian forest creatures””look at all the Canuck actors!””from the capitalist foibles of our neighbours to the south who seek to squash outsiders they don't understand.

But whether their simple, madcap film is appreciated at this level or at furry-face value, directors Tim Johnson (Antz) and Karey Kirkpatrick have created a family movie whose appeal is broader than the grin on moviegoers' faces when Hammy discovers caffeine.