Eugene Weekly : Movie Review : 04.20.06

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Pop Corn

Creepy animation, trite plot wreck retold tale.


BY MOLLY TEMPLETON

HOODWINKED: Directed by Cory Edwards with Tony Leech and Todd Edwards. Written by Edwards, Edwards and Leech. Produced by Maurice Kanbar, Sue Bea Montgomery, Preston Stutzman and David K. Lovegren. Starring the voices of Anne Hathaway, Glenn Close, Jim Belushi, Patrick Warburton, Andy Dick, David Ogden Stiers, Andy Dick, Xzibit. Weinstein Company, 2006. PG. 81 minutes.

Little Red has an understandable desire to escape her 'hood.

I'm a sucker. That's all there is to it. You give me a retold fairy tale, folktale, myth or iconic story of any sort, and I'll give it a try. This fascination continues despite the simple truth that for every Wicked (the exceptional novel by Gregory Maguire; I reserve judgment on the musical), there is a King Arthur, something so inept that even the valiant efforts of the likes of Clive Owen can't redeem it.

And then there's Hoodwinked. Which is aptly titled. In this case, the actor who seems to be trying to do the redeeming is Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries). She stars as Red, that little girl who went through the woods to her granny's house and found something unexpected. Hathaway voices Red as pert, friendly, clever and impatient with incompetent adults — which makes her the most likeable person in a cast of bumbling cops (depicted as bears, birds and — if only I were kidding — pigs), a sly reporter, a hyperactive squirrel, a neurotic rabbit, a doofy woodsman, a quartet of evil European skiers (yes, one is named Dolph) and a Granny who's got a few secrets up her sleeve.

Speaking of sleeves, one of the first things you have to get over, with Hoodwinked, is the creepiness of the character animation. With their motionless garments and oddly proportioned heads, the human characters look like action figures with big, rolling, shiny doll's eyes. Red's bellbottoms don't give the tiniest flutter as she rides her bike through the forest, not even when a flock of hummingbirds gives her a lift over the river.

Hoodwinked starts off well enough with four characters recounting how they came to be in Granny's house on that fateful evening. Red was worried about Granny. The woodsman (Jim Belushi) was trying to find his inner tree-chopper (his bizarre, nonsensical ditty about schnitzel is one of the movie's more charming moments). The sarcastic wolf (Patrick Warburton, whose wry tones liven up his every scene) was on the tail of the Goodie Bandit, who's been stealing recipes and leaving the forest's bakeries destitute.

And Granny? Granny's into extreme sports, man! She was up on the mountain saying "Fo shizzle!" to her snow bunny pals!

It's at the point of Granny's confession that Hoodwinked truly falls apart, becoming a sort of Shrek-lite complete with grating pop songs and references that stopped being timely about five minutes ago. If Granny's GGG tattoo — in the style of Vin Diesel's XXX logo — isn't enough, we then get to meet the dreaded Goodie Bandit, who has a Dr. Evil-like lair and an apparent need (was he reading the James Bond Villain Handbook?) to recount his entire evil plan before trapping our heroine in a manner she is most certain to escape. For a movie that aims to tell an old tale like you've never heard it before, the whole thing feels awfully familiar.