How did Bruce Willis, Nick Nolte and William Shatner agree to this?

Rating: 1/10 (16 June 2012)

This movie is, in fact, quite possibly the worst DreamWorks animated film I ever saw.
My 11-year-old self was delighted when we rented this, but it turned out to suck. And on top of that, I was forced to watch it again with my Grade 6 class and one of my elementary school's Grade 3 classes sometime before school ended, and to top it all off, I missed our final assignment in French class! And a lot of my classmates in high school still think it's a riot... whereas they won't appreciate what great bits of cinema there are, this is not one of them.
If it left a bad taste in the mouth of my 12-year-old self, what makes you think it's going to be any better for me as a 16-year-old? To begin with, this movie has a very weak plot that could've have easily been dealt with on an episode of Spongebob (granted, newer episodes of Spongebob are not as good as the earlier ones, but they're far better than this by a long shot), has way too many irrelevant moments that attempt to keep the little kids focused on the screen but end up making their parents want to die ASAP.
RJ, inappropriately voiced by Bruce Willis, introduces the innocent, naive hedge creatures to the great aspects of American life he has witnessed. But it's not without bad food jokes, caffeine jokes and god-knows-what-FREAKING-ELSE jokes.
And seriously, why make an exterminator and an over-obsessed real estate woman the villains in this flick? Martha Stewart would call nonsense on the latter.
The plot, what little there is, is burdened by the aforementioned jokes, PG-rated humour and chase scenes that become trite after the umpteenth chase scene and out-of-place celebrity involvement.
I am struggling to believe that this movie was ACTUALLY good enough to warrant favourable reviews and not even one Golden Raspberry award.
The voice acting is ill-suited, why is an action star voicing a greedy loner raccoon? And the PG-rated humour is just plain disgusting for a children's movie: Talk of licking private parts, Hammy the squirrel's awful and totally far from subtle "Where's my nuts?" jokes and even Verne the turtle losing his shell... the fact that all this is marketed towards children is ludicrous and should not be seen by anyone unless they're looking for a way to torture someone without necessarily having to go to jail.
And to add insult to injury, there is a montage of RJ and company stealing numerous things from the human neighbourhood. I know animals do this, but given there's virtually no consequence for this, it's pretty much teaching our kids to become criminals.
This one... skip it and don't show it to your children at all costs. Instead, show them some classic Disney and Don Bluth films, such as Winnie the Pooh, The Land Before Time, The Rescuers Down Under etc.
You have been warned... if you insist on showing this to little kids, don't say I didn't warn you.