New animated movie has hunting crowd in its crosshairs

Make no mistake about it, the movie “Open Season” is really open season on hunters.

The animated feature currently playing takes aim at hunters who take aim at animals and sums up the rest of the gun-toting population as buffoons.

This is a propaganda film designed to plant the idea in the minds of America’s children that animals are more or less cuddly good guys and hunters are bad guys.

Before a non-hunting co-worker took his kindergarten-aged daughter to see the movie, I asked him to watch how the hunters were portrayed. He reported that the hunters were shown in a stereotypical manner — as yahoos who slobbered, drove pickups and spoke with Southern accents.

Shaw (voiced by Gary Sinise), the ultimate dingbat, is indeed a bloodthirsty, law-breaking, fanatical poacher. In short, someone any respectable hunter would disavow and turn over to the conservation police faster than turning over a flapjack in a frying pan. I expected the animals to be cute, gooey caricatures that would make me cringe. But Boog, the grizzly bear with an identity crisis (Martin Lawrence), was quite tolerable. His unwanted deer sidekick Elliot (Ashton Kutcher), is a mass of insecurities that make him annoying, but who occasionally displays a standup comic’s wit.

“Open Season” is for kids who have no powers of discernment, but the script is for adults who have to chaperone them. So there definitely are chuckles. Even Shaw gets to mouth off cleverly once. During a yelling match with a female park ranger whom he calls “Girl Scout,” he says, “Put me down for a box of thin mints.”

Boog was a cub rescued in the wild and raised by Ranger Beth. He lives in her garage, has his own Teddy Bear and knows he has a good deal getting three squares a day and watching TV. Elliot leads Boog into mischief, and reluctantly, Ranger Beth relocates Boog to the mountains to begin a normal life as a wild bear, minus the room service. (The shifts back and forth between unrealistic fantasy and occasional common-sense environmental policy can leave you dizzy, and it’s not the way animals would actually be rehabilitated.)

Boog is a bear who has no affinity for the woods and no idea how to use his growling, intimidating size and super strength to protect himself or his friends. All he wants to do is go home to his Marriott-like garage space.

Wild man Shaw, determined to plug Elliot and Boog, is in the way and wreaks catastrophe wherever he goes. He was nuts from the get-go and is completely looney-tunes by the end of the flick. He has spent a lifetime operating on the assumption that man is at the top of the food chain and now he envisions an animal conspiracy, with pets “as double agents,” seeking to take over the world.

Legal hunting season opens and hunters from the Yellowstone-area-like town of Timberline head to the woods, where they raise tents, light campfires and begin hunting. They are met by an animal rebellion that features Boog, Elliot, skunks, deer, squirrels, rabbits, beavers and anything else that is around.

The hunters are routed and the animals live happily ever after in the forest, which Boog realizes is his true home. The unexplained, strangest part of “Open Season” is its apparent disdain for rabbits. It is indeed curious that rabbits are treated as disposable trash. What’s up with that?

Of course, not for one second does an honest, nature-loving outdoorsman appear on the screen. Not one sentence is uttered explaining how hunters love the woods, use the meat from their kills to feed their families or are conservationists whose hunting prevents species overpopulation.

And it never mentions that grizzly bears often eat other animals.

Oh, well, it won’t be long until new movies are released and it will be closed season on “Open Season.”