Heather is a main character in the Over the Hedge franchise. She is one of RJ's best friends and Ozzie's daughter. Being the only teenager, she has an awkward place in the family. She's too young to be friends with the adults, but too old to hang out with the young kids.
She is voiced by Avril Lavigne.
Biography[]
In Over the Hedge[]
Heather is Ozzie's daughter and starts out irritated by his dramatic behavior and impulse to play dead at the slightest disruption. Ozzie insists that it's necessary to protect themselves from predators, but Heather isn't sure about it. He never plays dead for any good reason, and it only serves as an embarrassment to her.
So, throughout the film, she gets embarrassed by her father playing dead for no practical reason. Once he uses it to his advantage to pretend he got hit by a car to help the family steal a cooler from a group of humans including Gladys and the Verminator, she's impressed.
Near the end of the film, Heather plays dead for the first time to distract Gladys, getting kicked down the stairs in the process. Her act was so convincing that even Ozzie assumed Gladys really killed her, making him proud.
She plays a minimal role in the main plot, but is the primary character who introduces RJ to the new "home" the family made for him with a TV, purple booster seat, and other human items. They did it in response to his (presumably) made-up story about how his family was killed in "the weedhacker incident". While that particular story was likely a lie, it's certainly clear that he has little experience being loved by a family and having a home. Because of Heather's prominence in this scene, it's entirely plausible that she led the notion of doing this for him.
She shows a lot of initial interest in RJ when he first introduces himself to the family. She later gets very worked up over the food they had gathered with the help of RJ after a quarrel between him and Verne causes everything they had collected to get destroyed.
For the final heist inside Gladys' home, RJ tells Heather to go keep an eye on Gladys so he can grab a can of Spuddies (which he secretly needs for Vincent), despite them having stolen enough food already. Even though RJ acts shadier than he ever has, Heather eagerly follows his orders and sneaks upstairs towards Gladys. Ozzie follows her in a panic. This leads to the death fake-out mentioned earlier.
She does not appear in the short film "Hammy's Boomerang Adventure".
In Over the Hedge: The Video Game[]
In the video game tie-in for the movie. Heather helps and assists her friends by showing tips and objectives in the game depending if the player chose RJ, Verne, Stella or Hammy.
However, Heather will randomly be in peril by getting caged or getting attacked by rats. She will even play dead like her father if there is no other option. After the Cotton Candy Heist, Heather was captured by Dwayne (the Verminator) and taken to Verm-Tech.
In the next evening when she was trying to escape Verm-Tech Institute, she was chased by Dwayne and that took her to the ground floor in the elevator which leads to the center of Verm-Tech for mind control.
After any of the 2 of the 4 characters defeat Dwayne, Heather is rescued and they leave Verm-Tech before it explodes. RJ carries her out, and she thanks him.
Personality[]
Heather is friendly, thoughtful, and a little shy, very often holding her hands together pure-heartedly. The way she talks blatantly parodies teenagers of the 2000s, yet she's rather soft-spoken. She is very enthusiastic about the human world, specifically trendy things like phones and TVs. She's typically good-natured, however, she is annoyed and embarrassed by her father's behavior, and develops a teenager's attitude when upset. Like the other animals besides Verne, she's naïve enough to buy into RJ's scam.
Appearance[]
Heather is a teenage opossum resembling a 16-year-old. She is relatively small and stubby compared to Ozzie. She has light gray fur and darkly-colored hands and feet. The pads of her feet and tips of her fingers are light pink. She has a slender black tail. Her face is long and pointed with a large pink nose. Her ears are black, but unlike Ozzie, the tops of them are speckled light pink. Her eyes are blue, like his. Her most distinctive feature is the dark shading around her eyes that resembles makeup.
Trivia[]
- The film was Avril Lavigne's first film voice-over.
- It's hinted that Heather may have a crush on RJ. She is seen dancing with him under a pair of headphones, grinning more timidly when he smiles at her during the TV scene, and other vague clues. RJ carries her bridal style after escaping Verm-Tech in the final level of the game, possibly to validate this theory.
- Nothing about Heather's mother is known, but her dad's paranoia towards danger suggests that she was killed.
- While it appears as though Heather has makeup around her eyes, this is clearly just her natural appearance, as she looked like that even before her and the others found out about the humans.
- These eyes are similar to her voice actress Avril Lavigne, as well as the pink tips of her hands making it look like she's wearing fingerless gloves.
- Both Avril Lavigne and William Shatner (who are the voices of Heather and Ozzie) are Canadian natives.
- Heather shares her name with another Dreamworks character, from the How to Train Your Dragon franchise.