When Shrek came out in 2001, everyone was blown away by it. Nothing like it had ever been done before. In 2005, two brothers, Cory and Todd Edwards, apparently decided that they could do something like that, only better. They came together and wrote a movie that wanted to be a parody movie like Shrek, a crime drama like Rashomon or Pulp Fiction, and a musical like any number of Disney movies. Combine that with animation that looks like it belongs in the early 90’s, and the result is just as weird as you think it is: Hoodwinked!
It starts off at the end of the traditional tale of Little Red Riding Hood, when Red is delivering her basket of treats to “Granny.” When the Wolf is about to eat Red, Granny and the lumberjack burst in. The cops are called, and the chief thinks that the incident is connected to the recipe robberies that have been happening all over the forest. A detective comes in and hears everyone’s side of the story.
Red says that she was out delivering for her granny’s shop, worried that the Goody Bandit might steal her grandmother’s recipes. Despite Granny’s wishes, Red takes the recipe book up the mountain to her house. Along the way, she runs into the Wolf, who wants her basket of goodies. The Wolf reveals that he’s an investigative journalist, and he suspected Red of being the Goody Bandit, which is why he and Twitchy followed her. The lumberjack reveals that he’s an actor, who was just trying to find the lumberjack spirit so he can get a role in a commercial. He jumped in through the window because he was running away from a rolling tree that he cut down. Granny reveals that she’s an adrenaline junkie, and she was in a skiing competition when the Bandit hired a rival team to take her out.
Red is mad at her grandma for lying and leaves, taking off her red hood on her way out. Someone swipes it and the recipe book when no one is looking. Meanwhile, the frog realizes that Boingo the bunny was in all the stories, and he must be the Bandit. Boingo kidnaps Red and puts her in a cable car rigged to explode. Granny, the Wolf, and Kirk go after her while Twitchy gets the police to the right location. Granny rescues Red and gives her back her red hood (though how it didn’t rip from all the pulling on it is unknown), Boingo and his crew are caught by the police, and the cable car defies the laws of physics by not flattening/shattering into a million pieces after falling from a great height into a river, and exploding after going underwater.
The next day, Red, Granny, the Wolf, and Twitchy meet Agent Flippers for breakfast. He offers them a job with the Happily Ever After agency doing undercover work. They agree to work for him.
Red Puckett, voiced by Anne Hathaway, is based on the character of the same name from the fairy tale. She’s a tough, no-nonsense girl, much like her grandmother. She longs for more in life than just delivering goodies throughout the forest, and she wishes to explore the world. She’s very close with her grandmother, but is still shocked when Granny comes clean about her double life. Everyone calls her Red because of the red hood that she wears all the time, and no one recognizes her when she takes it off. I don’t know what her real name is, or even if she has a real name, since even Granny only calls her Red. I also don’t know where her parents are. She doesn’t live with Granny, so I’m assuming she lives with her parents. I’m also guessing that she’s in her late teens, since the movie never says how old she is. She gets her wish to leave the forest at the end of the movie.
Granny Puckett, voiced by Glenn Close, is an adrenaline junkie and a baker. She competes in several extreme sports competitions, but she doesn’t let her family know about this because she doesn’t want to worry them. Everyone assumed that she was just a sweet old lady. She does some of the stereotypical granny things, like baking cookies/sweets, but she can also kick butt when she needs to. Her recipes are some of the best in the forest, and everyone wants her goodies so much that Granny was able to hire Red as a delivery driver. Where her husband is, or if he’s even alive, is not stated. I don’t know how she keeps her secret, since apparently she has merchandise and several people who watch her compete. It only takes one person to tell Red, “I saw your granny compete in (event) last Saturday. She was awesome!” In the end, her secret was blown, but I don’t know if the rest of the family knows or not. Guess we’ll never know.
Wolf, voiced by Patrick Warburton, and his partner, Twitchy, voiced by Cory Edwards, are investigative reporters. Wolf has no proper name, not even in the credits. There’s a picture of him in a newspaper that gives his name as Wolf W. Wolf, but that’s it. Twitchy is a hyperactive squirrel and Wolf’s cameraman. They work well together, even when Twitchy makes things harder for Wolf. Wolf used his job to gather clues as to who the Bandit might be, and he suspected Red and Granny for a while. That’s why he acted the way he did in the woods and at Granny’s house. However, even though he was willing to help, Wolf did very little when it came to rescuing Red towards the end of the movie. He provided a distraction while Granny snuck in, but that was it. Twitchy did more, since he went after the police and told them they were going in the wrong direction. Wolf has the best lines in the movie, and Patrick Warburton did a good job voicing the character. Most of the jokes that made me laugh came from Wolf. When I was a kid, I liked Twitchy. I think a lot of kids like Twitchy. Twitchy is a lot like Hammy from Over the Hedge, and I was shocked when I found out that Hoodwinked! came out a year earlier. I mean, they both gave the hyperactive squirrel an energy boost that made them move super fast. I don’t know if ideas were stolen or what, but these two scenes are eerily similar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVw5a4OjcIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-eMdMsMgCU
Kirk, voiced by Jim Belushi, is an actor and a schnitzel truck driver. He dreams of being a professional yodeler. In the credits, he is simply listed as “The Woodsman.” He stumbled his way into the plot because he chopped down a tree incorrectly, and it started rolling down a hill towards him. His only escape was through the window of Granny’s house. He offers very little to the actual plot. (I think they only included him because the original fairy tale had a lumberjack chop Red and Granny out of the wolf’s stomach.) He was a victim of the Goody Bandit, and he provided a clue to the identity of the thief, but that was it really. He tagged along with Granny and the Wolf when they rescued Red, but he didn’t do that much. He doesn’t appear at the end of the movie, since he was able to join a yodeling group. I guess the yodeling group has no expectations, since they offered him a position the day after hearing about him on the news.
Boingo, voiced by Andy Dick, is a rabbit and also the Goody Bandit. He inserts himself into everyone’s lives so that he can steal their recipes. He plans on taking over the baked goods industry by literally squashing the competition, after he’s added in a secret ingredient to all the recipes to make them more addictive than normal goodies. (It may or may not be an illegal substance, we were never told.) He got away with stealing recipes and putting the competition out of business for a long time. Why were there so many bakeries in a forest and how long did it take for Boingo to put them all out of business? Who knows. The important thing is, no one suspected him, not even Wolf, who said he chased down every lead he got about who the Bandit might be. The whole time that bakeries were shutting down left and right, and recipes were being stolen, no one realized that he was always right there when it happened. As egotistical as he is, Boingo isn’t that far away from making everyone sing this song whenever he enters a room: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML0Ho2EgvwY
Detective Nicky Flippers, voiced by David Ogden Stiers, and Chief Grizzly, voiced by Xzibit, are investigating the case of the Goody Bandit. The chief is a bear who desperately wants to close the case of the Goody Bandit, and he accuses anyone he thinks may be the guy. Flippers, on the other hand, is a frog and a special agent with the Happily Ever After organization, and he’s willing to hear all the facts before drawing a conclusion. It was Agent Flippers who deduced that Boingo was the guy. The two have crossed paths before, and Grizzly doesn’t like it when Flippers interferes with his investigation. Flippers has a pet dog that he keeps on a leash. Why a frog has a dog for a pet, I couldn’t tell you. This is a crazy, messed up world we’re dealing with.
Apparently, this movie was trying to be a musical as well as a crime drama fairy tale parody movie. The songs were not impressive. At all. A couple were actually a bit annoying. Mostly though, they’re forgettable. I’m not even sure how many songs there were, but I’m thinking only two. Maybe three. And I’m not going to watch the whole thing again to listen to find out, or go on YouTube. Speaking of YouTube, none of the big name YouTube critics (CinemaSins, Honest Trailers, Nostalgia Critic-though this movie may not be old enough for him- HISHE, etc.) have touched this movie. I know, I looked. There’s a lot that they could do with it, I’m sure. This movie isn’t bad enough to get their attention, and it doesn’t have a big enough following. Maybe one day, one of them will discover this film, but until then we have to form our own opinions.
The animation is not that good, even by 2005 standards. (Other movies released that year include Chicken Little, Madagascar, and Robots.) The animals are passable I guess, but the people are extremely plastic looking. They’re actually scary to look at for prolonged periods of time. In 1995, Pixar had a similar problem with their animation technique, so they decided to work around the limitations and came up with Toy Story. However, Toy Story still has better animation than Hoodwinked! The backgrounds aren’t much better. They’re very colorful, but they look like they were made in Paint. It’s awful. Part of the problem was that this movie was independently funded, which meant the budget wasn’t as big as it would’ve been had it been produced by Disney, Dreamworks, or another studio, and the animation was sent overseas to cut costs. (Hoodwinked! only had a budget of about $15M while the budgets of Chicken Little, Madagascar, and Robots ranged from $60M-$78M.) They also decided to base the look on stop motion animation movies, such as those produced by Rankin/Bass, because they knew the animation wasn’t going to be up to par. This didn’t really work, since it still looks like cheap animation. But Hoodwinked! was independently funded, and it feels like they blew a lot of their budget on the voice cast. Yet somehow, this movie was able to gross $110M at the box office.
This was a hard film for me to write for. I like to do some research outside the film and talk about theories surrounding the film. Fans will note that I will often leave links to YouTube videos that I enjoyed and are relevant to the topic. But there was nothing with this movie. Like I said earlier, none of the YouTube critics and theorists have touched this movie. It’s not bad enough to be made fun of, and despite earning $110M at the box office, it’s not big enough or popular enough to have a following. This movie has very mixed reviews (46% on Rotten Tomatoes), and that’s how I feel. It has decent writing at times, and there are a few good laughs thrown in (mostly Wolf). The animation, though, is just absolutely awful. It’s not a very memorable film. Little kids will get a lot more laughs out of this than I did. It had its moments. Although it is funny how seriously this movie takes itself at times. Overall, it’s a pretty harmless film.
I’m SJ and these are my real thoughts on Hoodwinked!