Seemingly once or twice a month, an animated movie with a suspiciously impressive voice cast, questionable production values and virtually no marketing opens in a shockingly large number of theaters, only to be gone just as quietly within a week or two. The latest example of this phenomenon is Hitpig!, an abysmal animated comedy very loosely adapted from the 2008 children's book Pete & Pickles by Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed.
Breathed is credited with the story, but the screenplay comes from Riverdance: The Animated Adventure writers Dave Rosenbaum and Tyler Werrin, and it's not clear how Breathed's involvement changed over the decade that the movie spent in various stages of development. Somewhere along the line, Pete the pig morphed into Hitpig (Jason Sudeikis), a leather jacket-clad "pet bounty hunter" who travels the world in a high-tech rocket-powered van and hunts down escaped animals for money.
Pickles (Lilly Singh) is still an elephant, although she's now one of Hitpig's targets, after she's been rescued from a Las Vegas show by animal-rights activist Letícia dos Anjos (Brazilian pop star Anitta). The mechanics of the movie's world are never properly defined, so there's no explanation for why Hitpig wears human clothes and essentially functions as part of human society, while animals like Pickles are kept in captivity and behave more like regular animals. Hitpig can talk to humans, but Pickles can't — except when she sometimes can, just like the other animals that Hitpig and Letícia fight over.
There's far too much room to contemplate the confusing rules of Hitpig!'s reality, since the story is a tedious, poorly paced mess, which careens around the world but never goes anywhere. It takes its time getting to the central setup, when Hitpig is hired by a Las Vegas performer known as the Leapin' Lord (Rainn Wilson) to recapture Pickles, the star of his upcoming show. By that time, Hitpig has already retrieved a radioactive polecat (RuPaul) who escaped from a nuclear power plant and a surly koala (Hannah Gadsby) whom Letícia liberated from a petting zoo.
It's inevitable that Hitpig and Pickles will become friends and that Hitpig will realize the error of his ways and help Pickles return to her family rather than bring her back to the megalomaniacal Leapin' Lord. Both characters are so annoying that it's hard to care about their connection, though, and Pickles in particular is almost willfully stupid, constantly sowing chaos and destruction with blissful ignorance.
There's a surprising amount of apparent animal death in this cheerfully idiotic movie, but the filmmakers never engage with anything approaching emotional depth, and the glib, recycled humor is at odds with the theoretically serious subject matter. It's hard to imagine Sudeikis, a talented comedic performer and writer, delivering any of Hitpig's horrifically unfunny lines without cringing, although perhaps looking at his bank balance made it easier.
There are terrible animal-related puns (Hitpig calls his martial-arts move a "pork chop" and references "lipstick on a pig" when he has to disguise himself in drag), random pop culture references ("Say hello to my little friends," Letícia inexplicably says when introducing her animal companions), and some uncomfortably mean-spirited fat jokes about the Leapin' Lord. This is the kind of movie that has a polecat deliver a nuclear fart and then say "Exsqueeze me" like the coolest fourth-grader during recess in 1993.
Breathed is also credited with character design, but Hitpig!'s aesthetic is atrociously garish, and Hitpig himself looks disturbingly like a haggard middle-aged man, with crow's feet, bushy eyebrows and bags under his eyes. Production company Aniventure is brazen enough to put its own logo on in-universe cartoon series Super Rooster, but no one should be proud of what has been achieved here.
Running a little over 70 minutes before closing credits, Hitpig! feels like a money-laundering operation designed solely to fool overworked parents who've already taken their kids to see The Wild Robot and can't wait a few more weeks for Moana 2. Just like the voice cast, the soundtrack is suspiciously packed with hits, opening with Steppenwolf's classic "Born to Be Wild." Never has that overused anthem of raucous rebellion been less accurately applied.♦
Hitpig!
Rated PG
Directed by David Feiss & Cinzia Angelini
Starring Jason Sudeikis, Lilly Singh, Rainn Wilson
