Real human trumps cartoon rabbit

Easter is still going on in our house. My older son still has a few chocolate eggs remaining, which are being doled out at intervals in accordance with his good behavior (which makes the intervals not all that frequent), and I myself ate half of a large white chocolate bunny last night while trying to stay awake during my viewing of High Art. (Didn't work; I had to fall asleep for two hours and finish after midnight.)

Earlier yesterday we continued Easter in a non-food-related manner by watching the movie Hop from 2011. I'd heard terrible things, but when I saw it at the library on Thursday, I knew it would be a good way to distract my son -- still Easter Bunny crazy -- with some morning viewing. I would watch it with him the first time (I had always expected to see it eventually), and then if it were a real hit, my wife could use it with him on either Tuesday or Wednesday morning when she's at home with him. We'd return it again on Thursday.

Surprisingly, I rather enjoyed the movie. Meanwhile, my son was bored.

See, the first moment of the movie that did not involve an animated rabbit provoked this response:

"Aw, this is a boring adult movie."

For the record, it was a scene in which human star James Marsden sits around a dining room table with John Heard, Elizabeth Perkins and Kaley Cuoco. It lasts all of about three minutes, but they're three crucial minutes in terms of getting in some rather efficient exposition that sets up the story's various conflicts. Then, back to animated rabbits.

To its credit, Hop goes very few stretches again in which the animated rabbit (called E.B., voice of Russell Brand) doesn't make an appearance. Unfortunately, the presence of live-action human beings seems to have permanently tainted it as a "boring adult movie" for my son, no matter how frequently the rabbit appears digitally inserted into the live-action environment. (The seamless insertion of, and interaction with, this rabbit was one of the things that impressed me about Hop.)

I tried to explain to my son that Hop was like Stuart Little, a movie he's seen a couple times, in that it has both real people and cartoon animals. He was hit with a lightning bolt of understanding that was accompanied by the word "Oh" changing octaves a couple times.

Which got him to pay attention for exactly 43 more seconds.

This would make a better post if I had had to finish the movie by myself later on, which happened recently with the likes of Epic, Monsters University and Turbo. As it turned out, after a ten-minute break around the 55-minute mark in which it seemed like I had lost him entirely, we did resume and finish the movie without incident. He actually paid attention rather closely. I have to say, though, I just think his morning burst of spastic behavior had burnt itself out.

What's interesting to me is how a movie can be so clearly aimed at him -- including the Easter Bunny, of all things -- and yet certain aspects of it can cause him to check out entirely. The makers of Hop were undoubtedly aware that this kind of thing can happen with children, which is why they limited the sections that featured only human beings.

Who would have thought, though, that Hop's biggest problem would be that it wasn't child-friendly enough?

The cinematic debut of the Easter Bunny

How?

How?

How can we have had over 100 years of movies, and never had a movie about the Easter Bunny?

Can Hop really be the first one?

It would seem so.

When I first saw the posters for Hop a couple months back, they were abstract, and I didn't know what they were. An Easter affiliation was not immediately clear. Then when I saw the bunny materialize -- followed by a pretty aggressive ad campaign in general -- I thought "Wait ... has there never been a movie about the Easter Bunny?" It was like when I first saw the ads for Wimbledon years back, and couldn't think of any other tennis movies. It was such an obvious topic for a movie that I couldn't imagine Hollywood collectively failing to capitalize on it for all these years.

A friend and I were theorizing last weekend about why the Easter Bunny had never been the star of his own movie. I put forth the idea that it was too much of a risk with Christians, who tend to overreact to things, and hold Easter as a particularly sacred day on their calender. A whimsical bunny rabbit who delivers candy on the date their savior rose from the dead? Nope, they're not on board with that.

My friend offered a different theory: "I just think no one's ever thought of it before."

Huh?

No one's ever thought of it?

I'm not saying he's wrong, but how could that be? The idea simply abounds with cross-promotional marketing opportunities. It's a good time of the year for movies, when audiences are almost primed for the summer season to start. And bunnies are just plain cute. It's not like we're talking about the Easter Snail or something. Bunnies are fluffy and cute and easy to turn into stuffed animals and other things children want their parents to buy them.

So I dug a little further to see if this is really the only movie about the Easter Bunny. My favorite go-to place for that these days is Wikipedia. If there's been movies or TV shows made about the thing you're interested in, there will usually be a section near the bottom devoted to representations in popular culture.

Under the "Media" section of the Easter Bunny entry on Wikipedia it says the following:

"The media often uses the Easter Bunny in various Easter advertisements and films, such as Hop, Here Comes Peter Cottontail: The Movie and Rise of the Guardians."

The "such as" part means that the previous list is not 100% thorough, but it does offer two other movies. So I looked them up. Here Comes Peter Cottontail is actually a computer animated film that premiered on The Disney Channel in 2005. Because the money-making potential of a TV movie is limited, this hardly counts, and it's actually a sequel to a TV special, the 1970 Rankin/Bass special of the same name. Then Rise of the Guardians is a movie that hasn't even come out yet -- it's not due out until the end of 2012. The animation looks cool and it has A-list vocal talent, but the Easter Bunny (voiced by Hugh Jackman) is only one of a handful of similar characters. Plus, there's that little detail about how it didn't beat Hop to the theater, so doesn't qualify in the current discussion. (Let's also hope people don't confuse it with Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole.)

I did some other relevant searches, and one list came up that I thought was useful: the top ten Easter movies for kids and families. This was sure to remind me of the Easter Bunny's previous appearances on the silver screen. But nope. These "movies" were mostly TV specials, like It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown and Yogi the Easter Bear. Again, this was not what I was looking for. Nor was the last movie on the list, a 1948 Fred Astaire movie called Easter Parade. Even the synopsis did not explain what if anything this had to do with Easter, let alone the Easter Bunny.

So congratulations, Russell Brand ... your Easter Bunny debuting today is the standard by which all future Easter Bunnies will be measured.

Oh, the Easter Bunny has shown up here and there as a secondary character over the years. The one that comes to mind is in The Santa Clause 2, where character actor Jay Thomas has what amounts to a cameo, appearing alongside other fairytale beings like the Tooth Fairy and Mother Nature. But you're always going to be second banana in a movie that also features Santa Claus, especially when his name is in the title.

It just amazes me when there are these very rare situations where Hollywood drops the ball -- or maybe the egg -- for so long. Although who knows, perhaps there's a reason. We'll find out this weekend whether the Easter Bunny is a character audiences really want to see up on screen.

My guess is yes, yes they will. And maybe in a couple years, I'll be writing a post that says "Enough of the damn Easter Bunny, already!"