Hoodwinked! (2005) review

Dir. Cory Edwards

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

After many years producing commercials and music videos in the greater Tulsa area, brothers Cory and Todd Edwards decided to start their own production company. A few years after that, they found themselves behind their own self-realized grassroots campaign to make one of the first independently funded computer-animated films. This was the mid-aughts. Computer-animation software capable of producing three dimensional images and characters, better known as CGI, was finally available at a price where those not flush with a windfall of Pixar cash could afford it.

The end result following animating struggles, a distribution deal with The Weinstein Company, and an overhauled voice cast was Hoodwinked!, a thoroughly charming picture that holds up over 20 years later. Unlike most experiments, this is a film that’s worthy of more than just a footnote in the history of animation. Frankly, its production and the Edwards brothers’ devotion to persist despite setbacks and financial limitations should have its own chapter.

Hoodwinked! reframes the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a police procedural in Rashomon fashion. It deconstructs the story of Red Puckett (voiced by Anne Hathaway) visiting her grandmother (Glenn Close) deep in the forest only to encounter the Big Bad Wolf (Patrick Warburton) in her place while granny is tied up in the closet. The Woodsman (Jim Belushi) literally crashes through the house to save Red from becoming the Wolf’s next meal.

Following all that calamity, Chief Grizzly (Xzibit) and Detective Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Stiers) are on the case. They permit each of the four involved to tell their side of the story, and how each could potentially incriminate the “Goody Bandit.” Red’s account basically serves as a prequel to how the story opens. The Big Bad Wolf asserts he’s an undercover journalist assigned to investigate Red’s involvement with the aforementioned bandit. Granny turns out to live a surprisingly nimble double-life. The Woodsman probably needed his own spinoff movie, to be fair.

While there is some redundancy in seeing the same story retold four separate times, despite the varying perspectives, the Edwards brothers, working with Tony Leech, inject a lot of energy and strong zingers into the narrative. Hoodwinked! is something of a musical too; likely due to the fact that licensing music was outside of the filmmakers’ budget. The variety of musical stylings is admittedly more memorable than the songs themselves. Todd Edwards flexes his vocal prowess on a few, including “Critters Have Feelings,” a song that truly applies to Twitchy (voiced by Cory Edwards), a rambunctious, motormouthed squirrel who makes real-life squirrels appear to move at the speed of sloths. Moreover, a goat, voiced by Benjy Gaither (son of Bill, founder of the Gaither Vocal Band), who cannot speak without yodeling all his lines, steals the soundtrack every chance he gets.

Hoodwinked! has been criticized, even by the Edwards brothers themselves, for its animation, which is understandably shoddy when pitted against the likes of Pixar and DreamWorks. For a budget reportedly around $8 million, with the visuals themselves outsourced to be completed in the Philippines, it’s no less remarkably colorful, with characters’ mouths believably reflecting what’s being uttered. Normally in these cases, subpar animation is made more noticeable and distracting when married with an awful story. Hoodwinked!‘s characters are charming and amiable, largely because the three writers are not keen on letting them be familiar storybook archetypes.

Quietly remarkable is how the animation on the human characters, Red and Granny, look and move fluidly. The mid-aughts was an era when even Pixar struggled to render human beings, finally finding their grove with The Incredibles a year prior.

At 74 minutes, Hoodwinked! breezes by, guided by the zeal of its zany humor and the winds of its ambition. The latter might have seemed misguided to cynical investors, but proved to produce a winning little gem and a trailblazer for its field.

NOTE: I got to chat with director Cory Edwards about Hoodwinked!‘s production, his work on VeggieTales, and more. Take a listen below!

Voiced by: Anne Hathaway, Glenn Close, Jim Belushi, Patrick Warburton, David Ogden Stiers, Anthony Anderson, Xzibit, Chazz Palminteri, Andy Dick, Cory Edwards, and Benjy Gaither. Directed by: Cory Edwards.