Review of Hoodwinked! (2005) by Jaimyv. — 03 Jul 2008

Without pixar's animation quality (mind you this is sort of an indie CG animation!) the only things you can rely on is: good plot, good songs, good voice actors and great jokes. Hoodwinked doesn't succeed summa cum laude, but it doesn''t fail either.

Now, every once in a while a joke will misfire, true, but Hoodwinked! has loads an loads of jokes. There are enough funnies to go around with. Like in most cases of CG entertainment, the hero- in this case heroine, Red, is the most boring of all.

Anne Hathaway does a great job in voice acting. But she's the girl-scout. That can't be interesting. Unless she's played by Tim Curry (öowilderness guwls, see loaded weapon 1 if you still haven't figured that one out).

She finds herself surrounded by great characters. Wolf (a great Fletch parody for which Patrick Warbuten is perfect, perhaps only outclassed by mr. Chevy C himself! Boingo - I won't go into this much.

Triple G Granny (a reference to Vin Diesels XXX), Nicky Flippers, The Woodsman (who sells schnitzel on a stick to kids), Japheth, a singing hillbilly goat (Japheth is by far the most brilliant creation for this film).

Twitchy a squirrel with ADHD. The incompetent keystone PIGS (get the pun?). The movie plays on the fact that we got Little Red Ridinghood all wrong, and this is her real story. This twist is nice and original, but it can't carry a tune over an odd 80 minutes.

The real twist is to play the plot like rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950). All the important Little Red Ridinghood characters are suspects and they are being interrogated. This is by far the most distinguishable thing from the movie.

This sets this movie aside and above from all other mediocre tries to CG enterainment. It creates an opportunity to have the stories intertwine and interact. Which the creators have done perfectlty and only during the last interrogation all things fall together (if you have been paying enough attention to every detail -even the minor details -hence the term "detail") The jokes are funny, though I agree some may misfire, and maybe, they rely on too many injokes.

A lot of jokes aimed at all-ages or us adults too! I love this movie. If you can see through the mediocre animation, you'll see the great characters and smart plot and storytelling. Although the animation style with the fairy tale style, so I didn;t think it was annoying.

Besides, the characters, the rashomon style and the jokes distracted me from the animation. Overall an above average movie that could have been great.