Hitpig!

Rated PG • Theaters

If you owe your kids a movie night because you’ve confiscated all the Snickers from their Halloween heists, take them to see Hitpig!, a new animated film opening this weekend in theaters. It’s fast-paced, funny, and mostly inoffensive. Better yet, return the chocolate bars to their lawful owners and make it a date night. It’ll likely take a grown-up audience to fully appreciate the oddball characters who rapid-fire witty lines, which will all make perfect sense when you hear who’s behind the quirky story.

Hitpig (voiced by Jason Sudeikis) is a friendless but successful snout-nosed bounty hunter who specializes in capturing escaped animals. After an animal rights activist (Anitta) frees Pickles the elephant (Lilly Singh) from the Leaping Lord of the Leotard (Rainn Wilson) and his one-man circus, the Las Vegas showman hires Hitpig to round up Pickles and return her in time for an upcoming major performance. Hitpig finds Pickles in London and befriends her under false pretenses, promising to take her to India, her country of birth. But after he leads Pickles in the other direction, her kindness begins to touch him. Hitpig must decide what he values more—reward money or friendship.

There’s no mistaking the target audience: Hitpig!’s sight gags give nods to several Gen X favorite comedy films, and its soundtrack draws heavily from 1970s and ’80s rock standards. Rich animation includes Hitpig’s tricked-out RV, a cross between a flower-power VW bus and a flying DeLorean. Hitpig! is not like so many animated films full of eye-popping action but mind-numbing dialogue. The film even takes a jab at one of these ubiquitous franchises in a scene where a newscaster (Andy Serkis) reports that a “popular panda walks off set, saying eight films is enough.” There are many other amusing touches, like a sassy, googly-eyed lobster (Flavor Flav) who scrubs Pickles in a bubble bath while lamenting his own past scares with hot water. Objectionable material is infrequent: some potty humor, a few jokes at the expense of overweight individuals, and a couple of near-expletives (such as “What the el … ephant?!”).

In a film genre characterized more by tricks than treats, there’s an aha moment when the end credits reveal the mind behind Hitpig!’s mirthful mayhem: cartoonist Berkeley Breathed. Of course! (See if you notice the briefly flashed image of Bill the Cat.) Breathed—who is credited as the characters’ designer, one of the writers, and an executive producer—is best known for his comic strips Bloom County (which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987), Outland, and Opus, which are all full of quirky characters. The film itself borrows from Breathed’s 2008 children’s book Pickles & Pete.

Hitpig! has enough laugh-out-loud moments that you won’t regret trading back the Snickers.