Hoodwinked

I’m sure all of you have heard of the Little Red Riding Hood, the fairy tale about a young girl in a red hood who goes to her grandmother’s, only find that her grandmother is actually a big bad wolf who wants to eat her, but is luckily rescued by a local woodsman who sets the real grandmother free and scares away the big bad wolf. It’s a classic tale known by many, but is it really the whole and true story? As the forest police arrive and each member is questioned by Detective Nicky Flippers, and it’s immediately apparent that it isn’t. In the forest, all the Goodie businesses have to close because a goodie bandit is stealing every recipe in the forest, all except Granny Puckett’s, which is currently in the protection of her granddaughter, Red, who works as a delivery girl. The Wolf, an investigative journalist, alongside his squirrel photographer, Twitchy, finds Red suspicious, so he followed and and tried to question her in the chance of catching her as the bandit, to no avail. The woodsman, named Kirk, is actually an aspiring actor, trying to prepare for a role as a lumberjack in a commercial, when he’s inadvertently flung into Granny’s house. With the bandit still on the loose, with all the members each holding a clue to the culprit, they all have to work together to catch the real bandit, and rescue the Goodie businesses everywhere.

This was created by Blue Yonder films, a growing film studio that was founded by Cory and Todd Edwards and Preston Stutzman. They began in 1996 with a short film called Swanky Nights, and then making the feature length Chillicothe in 1999. A private investor and owner of Kanbar Entertainment, Maurice Kanbar, decided to commission Blue Yonder to create an animated fairy tale film. Cory and Todd, along with Tony Leech, decided on Little Red Riding Hood as the main theme. Because Kanbar could only afford to finance the production, The Weinstien Company bought the film for distribution. The film was premiered in December 2005 in the hopes of getting Oscar nominations, with a full theatrical release the following month.

For the most part, the animation isn’t as horrible as many people say it is. Sure the models look cheap, the animation itself is a little clunky at times and considering that this came out the same year as Chicken Little, Madagascar, Robots and Valiant, the whole visual feel of the film feels out of dated, even when compared to those films. It is said that Blue Yonder knew they couldn’t make a film look as good as Pixar and Dreamworks so they decided to give the film a stop-motion animation aesthetic, with inspiration from Rakin-Bass, but it’s hard to see that style in the film itself. However, what they do succeed at is not what they have, but how they use it. The editing in this film is really effective when it comes to the film’s comedic moments, it’s probably the only animated film I know of that perfectly pulls off a reverse playback shot to comedic effect.

This film has really not much of a soundtrack, there is backing music, but nothing that closely resembles a consistent or recurring theme. If there is any music that plays it’s only on the occasion any dramatic or comedic moment occurs or if a scene is of a certain theme, like silent era style for the opening sequence and contemporary jazz found in detective scenes whenever Nicky Flippers is on screen. As for songs, there’s quite a few, some of them are well sung and have their charm like Red’s song, some are entertaining for their cheesy value such as the main villain song and are just hilarious like Jaspeth the Goat’s singing moments. The songs aren’t great, but I’d be lying if I said some of the songs did make me laugh.

Most of the voice acting is mainly underplayed, since all of them have one character mode, not much emotion but not really over the top. Anne Hathaway is probably the actress with the largest range, playing Red, giving a no nonsense tomboy attitude, does have some emotion, but for most of the time she’s bland. The most entertaining would probably be awarded to Twitch, voiced by a vocally pitched and sped up Cory Edwards, his lines mixed with his fast dialogue makes him really funny to watch and Jaspeth the Goat, voiced (or vocalised) by Benjy Gaither, as his performance of having 95% of his dialogue be read entirely in song is fun to listen to since he’s a decent singer. It’s hard to pick a worst performance since outside their one character traits, the rest are really shallow, especially Patrick Warburton’s performance as Walter W Wolf, who’s very monotone and really dull.

When you talk about the story of Hoodwinked, it’s hard not to compare it to the Dreamworks animated classic Shrek, since both essentially have the same concept, an animated comedy adventure that parodies the world of fairy tales. While it’s debatable over who came up with the idea first, depending on the level of parody and the time when both films began proper production, at the end Hoodwinked came out five years later, and surprisingly, shares no similarity at all to the much more popular film. While Shrek’s version of the parody follows the renaissance-era fairy tales, setting itself in a medieval period and either avoiding or twisting medieval culture with modern culture, Hoodwinked follows a more modern fairy tale theme that focused around animals, hence its main setting is a large forest, with the addition of modern culture, having a story which essentially is based on The Usual Suspects. I think it’s especially clever to parody fairy tales by directly following and extending a fairy tale classic. There are some good jokes here and there and I’m glad this one didn’t go directly into popular culture references and adult humour is very minimal. The only real issue I have is the wink towards the sequel at the very end, not only because it seems kind of forced and the stupid idea did actually lead to a pretty terrible theatrical sequel, but because it isn’t subtle, and the plot itself doesn’t warrant a continuation.

This is one of the rare cases where an animated film focuses more on its story and humour more than its animation and sound. While it isn’t the worst in both, it definitely doesn’t look like a film where you would see it advertised and think “this looks good” or “wow I want to see Patrick Warburton play a wolf reporter”, which means the reason it did so well and it’s a fairly good film is because it’s actually funny and a clever parody on a famous fairy tale.

Hoodwinked is available from the Weinstein Company, Momentum Pictures and Genius Products. The original story, The Little Red Riding Hood, originally a 14^th Century Folktale before being popularised by Charles Perrault and The Brothers Grimm, has been published in many form and has spawned many other adaptations such as films, TV shows, stage musicals and other parodies that other classic fairy tales have gotten. A film sequel titled Hoodwinked Too: Hood vs Evil is also available from the Weinstein Company as well as Anchor Bay Entertainment, although even the premise alone should really be a warning as to how much of a cash grab sequel this is, since the film acts more like a spinoff then a proper sequel.