Andy the Talking Hedgehog (2019)
A Profoundly Confounding Movie Experience
This Bleeding Eye Cinema shit really keeps me on my toes. The plot of this movie hadn’t even started before I had to pause my Tubi player and take some notes slash do some research.
The first thing you’ll see when you boot up your Walmart DVD (probably) of Andy the Talking Hedgehog is a studio logo for www.BeYourOwnHollywood.com. The logo promises that you can “Learn Film Finance and Distribution” at this online location. Upon navigating to this site – which, if you are like me, you immediately paused the film, dialed up your modem, and went to the site – you find two different video thumbnails, basically laid over the top of one another. Both videos introduce you to Joel Paul Reisig – well, more accurately, the video in-lay at the bottom introduces you to the embedded YouTube video above.
Reisig’s website is marketing a training program for those interested in breaking into the movie industry. In the intro video (the YouTube one), he explains that “film schools are basically going to teach you the right way to do things, and I am hopefully … going to teach you the wrong way to do things, because that is how actual producers actually get things done.”
I know nothing about Reisig. I’m not going to sit here and disparage his business. I have no reason to believe it is disreputable. The only thing I will say is that his video pitch feels slightly misleading. While not directly saying his course is more worthwhile than film school when it comes to getting work in the industry, the testimonials in the video are intimating that one learns more from Reisig’s class than one would learn in film school. Maybe they’re right. My personal advice for budding film professionals, however, is to go to film school (probably business school if your goal is producing and financing) and/or get actual industry experience. If you want to buy Reisig’s training DVD on the side, that’s your choice.
OK, so we are exactly 19 seconds into our screening of Andy the Talking Hedgehog, a Joel Paul Reisig production. Let’s continue.
The film begins with a classic bait-and-switch screenwriting cold open: Our hero, a talking hedgehog named Andy, has been kidnapped? How did he get here?! Well, we’ll have to wait to find out! First, we have to go back a few days to when Andy was in the park with his best friend Lilly Mason (Karina Martinez). Lilly made a wish, see, that … oh, wait, what? We’re flashing back to an even earlier point in time? OK. I guess that’s fine.
We back up to earlier that day (?) where we are introduced to Lilly’s family: her mother (Colleen Gentry), father (Dean Cain), older sister Tina (Allison Rowe), and Whiskers, the hairless cat that exists in a strange void space above a cabinet. Over freeze frames, Andy quickly gives us the two-sentence bio on each character.
There is little time to absorb all of this expository information before we jump back to Lilly making the fateful wish, which transports her to a magical world where Tara Reid is a “fairy BFF.” This fairy BFF, despite having never met Lilly before, knows everything about the young girl, which … is strange, but I guess they’re BFFs, so it’s fine … even though Lilly doesn’t know this adult stranger … we haven’t even hit the 10-minute mark yet …
This magical fairy, who is never given a name so I’m just going to call her Tara Reid (it’s better than what Andy calls her: “funny-looking little fairy chick”), grants Lilly one wish. Lilly wishes for “all her friends to talk,” and her only friends are apparently “flowers, birds, and Andy” (I would make a mean joke at Lilly’s expense here, but my New Year’s resolution was to stop bullying children. Something Andy should consider, but more on this later).
I guess Tara Reid mishears Lilly’s wish, as she repeats the wish back to Lilly as “flowers, birds and animals,” which, like, really? I hate birds as much as the next rational human, but they do exist within the category of animals. For a script, it’s pretty redundant. Unless it is meant to be a joke? Is Tara Reid mishearing the little girl and saying animals a scripted joke, or does the screenwriter believe birds and animals are two entirely separate ontological categories of being? It doesn’t help that later a different character says the exact same thing: flowers, birds, and animals. Is this an animal taxonomy thing that I’m too stupid to understand, or am I being gaslit by Joel Paul Reisig into believing that birds aren’t animals?
(We’re at the 6-minute mark).
And I’d say all is well, and that we can continue full steam ahead without needing to pause the Tubi DVD again, but … is the internal logic of this movie already fundamentally confused? Indeed. One of the first lines Andy speaks, in voiceover as he is being kidnapped, is that it is normal that we can understand Andy speaking because “animals talk all the time. You people simply just don’t want to listen.” So which is it? Is it a wish granted, or are humans ignorant of animal speech?
Once Andy gets the power of speech, he starts mouthing off some serious sass! He goes on about how a lot of people’s lips are moving, but they never have anything good to say. He makes a weird penis envy joke, I think, where he says Whiskers has “hedgehog envy” and then says “nevermind” when Lilly doesn’t get it. Which…what does that joke mean? How does a cat have penis envy for a hedgehog? How does it get worse from here?
The conflict of the film begins when a boss fairy (Grover McCants) informs Tara Reid that her wish would have catastrophic consequences (for reasons not made immediately clear). Tara Reid has violated a code of Fairy BFF conduct, and she is promptly punished by being turned into a toad, which we are told is an extremely painful process and that makes the otherwise lighthearted family friendly gag kind of unsettling.
Somehow, Andy is aware of this conversation about conduct violations, as he comments in voiceover about it (“the big fairy was right”), which leads me to believe Andy the talking hedgehog is some omniscient, god-like figure in this movie’s story world. He comments on the film’s villains in voiceover before meeting them. And now that I think about it, he speaks directly to us, as well. Does Andy the talking hedgehog exist on multiple planes, hopping between both fictional and material realities like some deranged, spiny Deadpool? There certainly is enough random lore in this movie to justify a psychotic meta-textual character that makes snide jokes about other characters … which is exactly what Andy’s entire role in this film is.
Anyway … the villains of the film bumble and bicker, belch and fart … as all good villains do. They are incompetent gardeners who, you know, garden and stuff (they’re also mechanics and pest control, too … they’re kinda just all-purpose blue collar workers). The script makes the claim that they only appear because of Lilly’s wish, even though they just stumble upon Andy by chance … I think? They bring a ladder to Lilly’s house, and, as much as I paused and rewound this film to try and understand the inexplicable things happening on screen, I have no idea why the two gardeners do this.
Whatever the reason, the gardener with an accent that oscillates between vaguely Eastern European and stereotypical Italian ends up on a ladder peeping tom into Lilly’s bedroom … I can’t believe all of these plot points are in a children’s film (I’m not even going to address the teenage girl that hits on and ogles her friend’s father, Dean Cain, as it has no discernible narrative purpose). The gardener witnesses Andy talking, and the two villains hatch a plan to steal the animal (definitely not a bird) and reap the financial rewards.
There is too much happening in the plot of this 75-minute children’s film to dive too far into the technical ineptitudes, but some visual moments are exceedingly confusing. Any shot with the cat, for one, is uncanny valley unsightly in a way that I was constantly confounded by. Then there is the ever-increasing fog that is in the background of the external scenes, as if the plot of The Mist is occurring about two blocks down the road. At one point, the gardeners speak with Dean Cain’s father character, and there is one angle of the coverage that has an insane amount of fog that cloaks all of the characters, then the fog disappears whenever it cuts to the reverse shot.
The scene immediately following this interaction shows the older sister’s friend walking into the kitchen, but the shutter speed of the shot is wrong. It will cut to the mother in the kitchen, and everything is fine, but in the shots of the friend her movements are slowed down, which make it appear like she is some astral figure barely attached to this plane of reality. This is a recurring problem that gives the film a cursed quality … are these ungodly characters going to slowly float their way into my waking world like a vaguely family friendly Samara/Sadako?
There are also reflections of boom mics, out of focus shots, and that sort of thing, but those errors are par for the course with this type of film. That said, there is at least a hint of irony here considering it is directed by a guy whose film training course downplays the importance of film school.
Andy the Talking Hedgehog, when it isn’t a confounding nightmare, is a bland family film with some horrendous writing. Andy, whenever he is talking, is insufferable. At points, it feels like the voice actor (and this actor is, let’s see here … Joel Paul Reisig. OK, got it) is improvising dialogue live as he watches footage of the hedgehog. And the lines which are certainly scripted are worse. Andy (the ostensible hero of the film) calls a teen girl “sugarlips” and a child “fat Betsy.”
Of course, broken clocks aren’t always utterly terrible at writing screenplay dialogue. There is this gem:
Mike the talking hedgehog: “These veterinarians, man, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Andy the talking hedgehog (while drinking milk): “Mike, for crying out loud, just drink milk!”
Poor Mike, with his tendonitis. I want to know what’s going on in his movie. A middle-aged hedgehog who is going through it, and his asshole friend Andy doesn’t support him at all.
The other redeeming moment in the film is Dean Cain’s character, who returns from work to find a home full of talking animals, and his first instinct is to believe he is having a complete mental breakdown. At the same time, he remains self-aware of the fact that he is losing his mind and often directly comments on it. It’s a comedic premise I can actually get behind.
I had to pause this film about 100 times during the first half just to understand what was going on. The 75-minute film quickly turned into something closer to a 2-hour experience. This is not the best way to experience Andy the Talking Hedgehog. I’m not certain there is a good way.
Also, and this is very important: the image from the film’s poster never happens in the movie. There is not a horse. A hedgehog does not ride a horse in this movie. This is very important.
Anyways … the flowers are talking to me … but just the flowers … it’s not like the movie; I’m not doing an I’m going crazy just like the plot of the movie bit … I’m just talking to flowers now … that’s it … that’s the bit … that’s all I’ve got after this 2-hour-long 75-minute experience. OK, bye!
At Bleeding Eye Cinema, we don’t rate movies based on their artistic merits. We rate them based on strangeness, on a scale from Colin Hanks1 to full-on, run-to-the-eyewash-station Eye Bleeder.
Andy the Talking Hedgehog rates as: Sanity Reducer (3/5)
Colin Hanks is the true cinematic touchstone of milquetoast normieness – no offense, Colin.