Amazon.com
Hoodwinked fuses the classic fairy tale of
Little Red Riding Hood with the crisscrossing storylines of
film noir--pretty ambitious stuff for a computer-animated cartoon. The police cordon off Grandma's cottage and an amphibious version of William Powell named Nicky Flippers (voiced by David Ogden Stiers,
M*A*S*H) begins interrogating the suspects: A Little Red in bell-bottoms (Anne Hathaway,
Ella Enchanted), a Wolf turned investigative journalist (Patrick Warburton,
The Woman Chaser), a snow-boarding Granny (Glenn Close,
101 Dalmatians), and a dimwitted would-be Woodsman (Jim Belushi,
Curly Sue), each of whom have very different reasons for ending up in that cottage living room. The visual style of
Hoodwinked mixes a clunky, video-game look with an homage to the stop-motion puppetry of
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and other Rankin-Bass holiday specials. While sometimes awkward, there are also moments of surreal beauty, such as when a depressed Red wanders through a field of blue and red flowers--and moments of lunatic comedy, such as the Schnitzel song, which is irresistibly bizarre. The
Shrek-style pop-culture references grow annoying, but the left-field goofiness of a yodeling goat points toward a far more distinct and delightful comic world. Also featuring the voices of Anthony Anderson (
Kangaroo Jack), rapper Xzibit, and an especially witty turn by Andy Dick (
NewsRadio) as a deceptively cute bunny rabbit.
--Bret Fetzer
Cory Edwards's computer-animated film is a "Rashomon"-like take on Little Red Riding Hood, with Red (voiced by Anne Hathaway), Granny (Glenn Close), the woodsman (James Belushi), and the wolf (Patrick Warburton) each telling his or her side of the story to a sly frog detective (David Ogden Stiers). The film is independently and cheaply made, and it shows: if the visuals are a little rough around the edges, the project nonetheless has the homemade and joyful tone of a high-school skit. The story is set in the cell-phone-and-personal-computer-free nineteen-seventies and features bell-bottoms, kung fu, and a clutch of songs that channel the era's hits, from ZZ Top's to Kurtis Blow's. Some of the subplots seem a bit farfetched, but when the music kicks in and the gags score—as with a banjo-bearing ram with interchangeable horns and an antically caffeinated squirrel—the film is an effervescent high for all ages.
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
