What you talkin' about, Willis?

WHEN BRUCE WILLIS talks about lending his voice for the first time to a cartoon character, one thing is clear. Following in the steps of Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, who play Shrek and Donkey in Shrek, and Will Smith, who gave the edge to Oscar in Shark Tale, he wants to be Jeffrey Katzenberg's latest animation sensation.

'I wanted to be the cat in Shrek 2,' he said, at the film's press conference at Cannes last month, 'but Antonio Banderas beat me to it.' He then pretended to have a fur ball stuck in his throat, and put on quite a show trying to cough it up, cat style.

In Cannes, the trim, bald, youthful-looking 51-year-old had been photographed with beautiful young women - one time sporting a red suit with a white T-shirt alongside model Petra Nemcova at the launch of The Big Red Book in aid of the Happy Hearts Fund.

Emitting his trademark smirk, Willis seemed to be more interested in having a good time than plugging his two festival films. While his raccoon might be the star of Over the Hedge, the critics reserved their praise for his one pivotal scene in Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation where his corporate creep blithely states how 'we all have to eat a little s*** sometimes in life', when referring to the contents of mass-produced hamburgers.

Is his burger king a bad guy? 'He's just being honest, that's all,' Willis responds, as if it applies to his philosophy on life as well. So what of voicing his scene-stealing raccoon, RJ?

'It's the hardest job I ever had in film,' he says. 'My smile didn't work and it was nerve-wracking to be there without other actors. I was never sure I was doing the right thing. Sometimes, there was a month or two between sessions, so I'd be shooting other films playing some grumpy, old men then come and suddenly play a fuzzy, little raccoon,' he says, putting on a cutesy, high voice.