Hoodwinked (U)

Review by Stephen Collings

Once upon a time, animated feature films came once a year. With Walt Disney king of his own magical castle, other studios like Warner Brothers and MGM were always the cartoon pretenders. A few million frames later and it was Disney, courtesy of its Pixar Animation Studios division, that kick-started the 3D revolution of computer animated films with a succession of hits from Toy Story and Monsters Inc. to Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Big buck upstarts like DreamWorks followed suit with Antz, which may have lost the ‘bug battle’ against Pixar’s A Bugs’ Life, but it’s lampoonery of Disney classics in 2001’s Shrek paid handsome dividends. Computers have simplified the whole animation process and the increasing accessibility of cutting edge technology has levelled the proverbial playing field and now it seems everyone wants a piece of the animated action.

This year alone has brought us Curious George, Cars, Over The Hedge, The Ant Bully, Monster House, Ice Age 2: The Meltdown and now a new studio, funded by the whim of a liquor entrepreneur, has jumped onto the bandwagon with Hoodwinked. In the same postmodern vein of Shrek and The Incredibles, Hoodwinked’s premise is an irreverent re-framing of a well-loved fairytale, namely Red Riding Hood. Turning the fairytale’s climax into a crime scene, the film uses Rashōmon-style flashbacks to decipher how Red (Hathaway), the Wolf (Warburton) and the Woodsman (Belushi) converged upon Granny’s (Close) house, and more importantly, what the connection is between these individuals and the nefarious “Goody Bandit” who has been half-inching the valuable muffin recipes. Cary Grant-esque Nicky Flippers (Ogden Stiers) leads the investigation, alongside Police Chief Grizzly (Xzibit) to unravel the woolly plot from the suspect’s hard-boiled yarns and uncover the identity of the mysterious villain.

Hoodwinked is the first feature-length directorial effort from Cory Edwards who co-wrote the film alongside brother Todd and the film’s editor Tony Leech. From the script to the musical numbers, the film falls short of its cash laden contemporaries and in aiming to include an adult audience, manages to misfire somewhere between the two extremes. The slapstick alone may be enough for the youngsters, but the cultural references are too lightweight to truly crossover the generational divide, compared to Shrek and The Incredibles, who understood that appealing to adults needn’t be at the expense of what is essentially a kid’s film. Whilst some may find Glenn Close saying “Fo’ shizzle” inherently funny, I found myself yearning for something more. Heck, given the red hood, a Don’t Look Now pastiche wouldn’t have gone amiss!

What this film really lacks is an original, or even cohesive idea. Slick animation and megabucks does not always equal box office gold as evidenced by the lacklustre Chicken Little and Shark Tale, but Hoodwinked, whilst at times imaginative, is bereft of the relative sophistication of ideas abundant in TV animation like The Simpsons, Family Guy or Futurama. The characters themselves, from the sassy, streetwise Red to the extreme sports fanatic Granny, are so obvious inversions of their fairytale personas that they become as clichéd as the Schwarzenegger-alike brawn-over-brains woodsman. Even the film’s standout character, a caffeinated sidekick squirrel (manically voiced by the director himself), is a direct lift from Ice Age’s Sisyphean critter, Scrat.

Considering the modest budget, the visuals themselves are at times impressive and the lush blades of grass or fluffy white clouds are up there with the House of Mouse, yet for long stretches the film feels like a videogame and one in which, frustratingly, you can’t take control of the characters. Whilst Disney manage to inject humanity into the most inanimate of objects, the designs here are, for the most part, lifeless and even the action sequences, from hang-gliding and snowboarding to kung fu, would not look out of place on your PlayStation or Xbox. Even if Disney’s sugaring is occasionally too sweet, the lack of heart here leaves nothing to counterpoint the constant stream of visual japery.

However, it is perhaps unfair to judge the film against its cartoon caper contemporaries when the ambition, from what is effectively a $15 million independent feature, is faultless. As a small fish in a pixel-rendered sea, their modest efforts still (briefly) topped the US box office, which in itself is worthy of a crass Disney ‘against all odds’ tale. Even in the dog eat dog (or Wolf eat Granny) world of animation, perhaps there are some happy ever afters, after all.