Hoodwinked

Animated fairy tales. I’ll bet 10 bucks that most of you just thought of Disney. That’s their specialty. They have the princesses, Pinocchio, all 4 Toy Story movies and many more. Who else could it possibly be? Dreamworks. They have created many fairy tales inspired masterpieces. Specifically Shrek, Shrek 2 and Shrek Forever After (We don’t talk about Shrek the 3rd). What other animated fairy tales are there? Well I’m glad you asked. Buckle up kids and fasten your mine carts cause you’re about to be Hoodwinked. 

Everyone knows the tale of the Little Red Riding Hood. She goes to bring cookies to her sick grandmother and gets followed by a wolf. The wolf eats her Granny, then her, but is killed by the huntsman, thus releasing Granny and Red from it’s stomach. This movie flips this story on its head. Now when Red enters Granny’s, she fights the wolf with her master karate skills, Granny is tied up in a closet, and the huntsman breaks in through a window. Everyone of them is placed under arrest for further investigation as they believe this case to be a part of a string of robberies committed by someone who goes by the name the Goody Bandit. 

This movie is full of twists and turns. Every event is connected and every plot hole in one story is solved in the next. The villain is a mystery the whole time. You don’t know which of the 4 is the Goody Bandit. It’s such a great twisted story of Little Red Riding Hood and doesn’t get enough credit. The cast is also amazing with Anne Hathaway as Red, Patrick Warburton as the Wolf and Glenn Close as Granny. 

The one drawback I will say is the animation. To be honest it sucks. It’s very fake and computer generated but they did have a small budget. This movie was 8 million dollars to produce and had to be animated in the Philippians to fit the budget and get every event they wanted in there. Compared to other animated movies from that year, they had about 1/7 of the budget of those movies. Madagascar, which was made the same year in 2005, had about 75 million dollars to work with. That’s a lot more. But other than that, this movie is great. The story is great, characters are great, twists are great, and even the few songs are absolute bops. 

If you’re ever in the mood for a fever dream of a movie, watch Hoodwinked! Still to this day one of my childhood classics.