Review of Hoodwinked! (2005) by Markb. — 24 Jan 2006

I honestly don't understand why people are moaning about the length of Peter Jackson's King Kong--a 3-hour film that plays like an hour and 45-minute one--when this animated pastiche (in the attempted style of Jay Ward's "Fractured Fairy Tales" TV cartoons with a nod to Stan Freberg's old comedy record "St.

George and the Dragonet") runs a scant 80 minutes but SEEMS like 3 hours. In Rashomon style, Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf, Red's grandmother and the seemingly heroic woodsman all give their accounts of what really happened in the famous story to the police and other law enforcement authorities (depicted as a bear, a frog, and--sadly, tritely and rather offensively in this age--a group of pigs).

There are definite reasons why the old Looney Tunes cartoons where Bugs Bunny confronted the Three Little Pigs, or Tweety and Sylvester climbed Jack's beanstalk, only ran about seven minutes each; this starts out reasonably amusing and original, and gets more and more tiresome and desperate as it goes.

A few funny supporting characters (a hyperactive squirrel, a mountain goat under a spell that won't let him stop singing, or so he says) help; so does the vocal work of Brokeback Mountain's Anne Hathaway, who plays Red as a cynical Gen Y-er, but does so with charm and great comic timing, and Patrick Warburton (who was so funny and winning as dimwitted semi-villain Kronk in Disney's The Emperor's New Groove that the studio recently released a DVD sequel centered around his character).

The decision to animate everybody in a wildly different visual style really sinks this: some characters are traditionally cute while others (especially the frog) are a real eyesore. Unfortunately, these sophomoric pseudo-Pixars with the self-consciously puffy looks and the committee-written chop suey scripts show no signs of going away; before watching this I saw previews of four more slated to come out in 2006, but also one of Curious George, a traditionally 2-D animated (glory be!) version of the classic children's books that seems blissfully free of the smartass postmodern attitude that afflicted Robots, Madagascar and Hoodwinked (glory hallelujah!) Please feel free to insert your own "manna in the wilderness" or "oasis in the desert" analogy here.