Stella is a main character in the Over the Hedge franchise. She is friends with Verne and RJ but is one of the most independent members of the family. She is also Tiger's girlfriend. She often complains about being a skunk, but uses her presence and stink to scare humans and make threats.
She is voiced by Wanda Sykes.
Biography[]
Beginnings[]
Not much is known about Stella's past, other than the fact that she has disliked being a skunk for quite some time. Due to this, she thinks of herself as repulsive and is quite aggressive on the subject of finding a 'man' for her.
In Over the Hedge[]
Stella had just finished hibernating, as spring had arrived. When the other animals refused to get out of the log, she made them get out by threatening to spray them. Penny is shown telling her she needs a man in her life, making her increasingly rude and sassy, telling her to call her when they find a man who has no sense of smell.
When Verne falls through the hedge, she threatens to spray it, thinking it ate him, until Verne reveals he simply tripped. When RJ arrives, he reveals all the food that the humans have and convinces them to come and eat there. She eats from a trash can until she and the others are chased off by a woman named Gladys Sharp.
Later on, she helps RJ and the other animals steal from the humans. She plays a key role in one of them, hiding in a birthday cake and bursting out, scaring off all humans, allowing the animals to take the food. These antics finally prompt Gladys to call The Verminator. After Verne loses all the food and makes a comment that hurts their feelings, RJ helps her and the others reconcile with him.
Stella's makeover
RJ then plans to get all the food back in one night by stealing everything from Gladys' house, which had been stocked up for a party happening soon. To get inside, they must get the collar from Gladys' cat Tiger that opens the pet door. RJ reveals his plan to disguise Stella as a black cat to distract Tiger with her 'feminine charm'. Stella opposes the idea until after the makeover, when she is stunned by her new sleek black appearance. When she goes to distract Tiger, he doesn't buy into her act at first, but after Stella gets fed up with niceness and starts berating him like she would as a skunk, Tiger surprisingly admires her for being bold. This gets them hooked up in a long conversation that lasts all night as RJ and the gang get inside the house and steal all the food. Tiger complements Stella on her beauty - the kinds of things she'd never heard before. They talk with each other about their lives, and they begin to fall in love.
The plan goes awry when Gladys wakes up and becomes manic at the sight of the animals. Stella sprays the whole house with her gas. Stella is scared of revealing herself as a skunk to Tiger, but finds out that he doesn't mind, partly because he reveals that he has no sense of smell. This seems to finally convince Stella that Tiger is right for her.
Stella and Tiger
The Verminator then appears and catches the animals, except for RJ, who escapes with the food. Tiger is separated from Stella as they are taken away in cages inside the Verminator's truck. RJ has a change of heart and uses the wagon of food to stop the truck and free the animals. Stella is unforgiving and threatens to gas him until Verne convinces everyone that he means good. After they defeat the Verminator, Gladys, and Vincent, Tiger finds Stella and reunites with her in the woods where the animals are celebrating. Surprising Stella again, Tiger declares that he likes the forest after stepping outside the hedge for the first time. Ironically, despite how insistent she was at the beginning of the movie that she didn't need a man, Tiger became Stella's boyfriend.
In Over the Hedge: The Video Game[]
Stella, as she appears in the video game
Although she wasn't a primary protagonist in the film, in the video game, Stella is one of the four playable characters alongside the main trio (RJ, Verne, and Hammy). She wields a plunger as her weapon. Like the other playable characters, she has unique dialogue interactions in levels depending on which playable characters were selected.
Personality[]
Stella is sassy, independent, assertive, and has a short temper. She threatens to spray people that get in the way of her and the others, even members of their own family. She's not afraid to use her words as a weapon. However, she still cares for her fellow animals. She is very self-aware about being a smelly skunk and gets upset about it until after spraying Gladys' house and hooking up with Tiger, where she starts to become more proud about it. Likewise, she used to get offended when it was suggested that she needed a man in her life until she met with Tiger.
Appearance[]
Stella is a common striped black and white skunk. She's a moderately-sized animal in the group with a size most comparable to Heather, but is considerably smaller than Tiger. She has stout legs and wide hips, a pink nose and ears, messy black fur and a hairy tail. For much of the film, she has white bangs covering her face, especially her green eyes. But, following her makeover where RJ dresses her to distract Tiger, she takes on the appearance of a black cat, losing her stripes and bangs, as well as making her fur glossy. When she loses her disguise, her stripes return, but her fur remains glossy and her bangs are still gone.
Trivia[]
- In the console games, if Stella uses her special attack where the player holds the button, there is a chance she will say, "Hope you can't smell!". This is a reference to Tiger and how he cannot smell. This is revealed when she fills Gladys' home with spray.
- In some trailers of the film, Stella is shown not to have white hair which could imply that Stella was originally not going to have white hair.
- Stella's 'final' appearance, after losing her bangs, is used for all 3 of her promotional images and in the video game, meaning that she never grew them back.
- Stella's name is used to reference A Streetcar Named Desire, where the character Stanley yells for the character Stella. After leaving Tiger outside to help the other animals inside the house with Gladys, Tiger screams her name.
- It seems like this joke was originally going to be taken even further - one concept art shows on a pet bowl that Tiger's original name was Stanley.
- According to the joke book, her last name is Stinkarella.
Gallery[]
