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Hoodwinked Movie Review

Hoodwinked is a 2005 animated comedy film directed by Cory Edwards and starring Anne Hathaway and Glenn Close among others. It’s a weakly animated, but funny flick.

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“I know about houses.

l built mine out of straw.

I’m not an idiot“

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Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf, the Woodsman, and Granny all tell the police the events that led up to their encounter. Now, this movie was released in the post ‘Shrek’ days, so the animated market was then in an obvious fairy tale parody craze. It was a huge box office hit, especially comparable to its tiny budget, but it received mixed reviews and I personally find most of them to be unfair.

Critics and fans often have the tendency to gloat too much the greatness of the Shrek franchise when in actuality this flick isn’t all that inferior in comparison to the famous DreamWorks franchise. Yes, it looks much weaker, but it’s actually funnier and its premise is much smarter than the one in the aforementioned series.

The whole movie plays out like a modern crime mystery set in this fairy tale world and that combination was ingenious. It obviously made the film too contemporary and far from timeless, but the results turned out to be highly entertaining and witty. The Tarantino style going on in the dialogue and action scenes was also very interesting to witness in an animated project.

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The humor is a mixture between the Looney Tunes antics and the more conventional parodying satire approach. Both worked to a degree. Some scenes weren’t great, but a lot of them actually did make me chuckle, especially the musical sequences that were uniformly hilarious. The German yodeling bit was so much fun while all the songs sung by this redneck goat singing country songs made me laugh every single time.

The characterization is okay. It could and should have been better, but collectively they work, if not individually. Red is somewhat forgettable, but her relationship with her granny is well explored. Speaking of Granny, she is by far the funniest and craziest one of the bunch. Basically, she has a whole different life outside of being a kind granny cook – she is an extreme sports enthusiast. Those scenes with her skiing were absolutely hilarious and the highlights of the flick.

The Woodsman is also a very fun character, The Wolf is great and the bunny villain was also cool. The movie has too many characters, but most were quite memorable. The detective elements worked and the flashback investigative framing of the story also was very well executed. The movie is fleeting fun – it is so quickly paced and so short for better and for worse. The directing and editing are only so-so in this instance. The voice acting from its start cast, though, is quite strong.

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Hoodwinked’s weakest element is obviously its animation. Being made on a cheap shows in every single frame here. Not only are the character models bad, but the backgrounds are terrible and the whole look is very unpolished and rough around the edges. It was dated then and it is certainly dated now. I know that computer animation is difficult to do on a small budget, but just the style of the movie was very off-putting. It’s a shame really because otherwise it could have rivaled ‘Shrek’ quite easily.

Hoodwinked was released during the fairy tale parody movement in animation back in the 2000s. It is a very underrated flick that is actually funnier than Shrek and more authentic in its premise. The crime mystery storyline set within this fairy tale world was quite interesting to witness. The dialogue was great, the humor was mostly very strong and some of the characters were quite memorable in their crazy personalities. The biggest downside was its animation as it was made on a tiny budget and it shows – it is very rough, badly designed and unappealing. It was dated even back in 2005.

My Rating – 3.5