Review of Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil (2011) by Shiira — 20 May 2011

The big bad wolf is a reporter. It's the perfect disguise for a sexual deviant. Nobody would ever suspect an investigative journalist of molesting little children. A newsman doesn't commit crimes; he reports on them.

In "Hoodwinked", Nicky Flippers, the British-accented frog who runs a secret agency called H.E.A., gathers all those under suspicion of being the "Goodie Bandit" into the parlor, which includes Red, her granny, the actor, and the furry scribe.

"The wolf did it. Talk about profiling," complains the journalist who systematically is accused, then exonerated by the frog during the amphibian's summation gathering, where through the process of elimination, it's determined that the bunny is the guilty party, who makes off with Granny's recipe book whilst Nicky imitates the pragmatism of a Scotland Yard detective.

But the frog, so smug and self-assured in his powers of deduction, drops the ball on the bigger, more heinous crime, in which he overlooks not one, but two sexual predators, who want nothing more but to ravish the little delivery girl.

Surprisingly, even though "Hoodwinked" is an animated film intended for small children, the adult theme of a young girl's sexual awakening, prevalent in the subtext of the classic Brothers Grimm faerie tale, where the wolf, who is made anthropomorphic by his attempt to seduce Little Red Riding Hood from her grandmother's bed in disguise as the silver-haired matriarch, is even more self-evident about his lecherous urges than the film warrants.

After the classic exchange between the girl and wolf about the latter's oversized body parts, anomalous to that of an old lady's anatomy, he adds, "Are we just gonna sit around here and talk about how big I'm getting?" Red, however, is considerably younger than her counterpart in "Red Riding Hood", as substantiated by her reluctance to walk through the woods(which is metaphorically speaking, representative of a girl's emerging womanhood), but instead, uses the ski lift to ride over the forest, therefore robbing the red cloak of its traditional association with menstrual blood.

Despite her tender age, Red, like all girls, can't help but be objectified, so inevitably, she ends up in the woods, and is suddenly fair game to the wolf, who doesn't care that Red's hymen is intact, and hasn't seen the sight of her own period blood.

Regardless, he comes on to her, making coded inquires about her "goodies basket", and the good smell that it gives off. From Red's point-of-view, the wolf's growl is a menacing one, imbued with sex in its primal roar, precipitating a chase which lands the libidinous pursuer into the lake(akin to a cold shower), where he shouts indignantly, "You can't hold on to those "recipes" forever," recipes, meaning, of course, her virtue.

Modeled after "Rashomon", this moderately ambitious cartoon has a narrative splintered off into multiple points-of-view. As the wolf tells it, his bared teeth and threatening hand gestures was induced by a tail injury, but given the filmic context of the celebrated touchstone in Japanese cinema, can the journalist be trusted to give an accurate recounting of events? Probably not.

He's about as reliable as the bandit Tajomaru and the other witnesses giving testimony to the prefecture magistrate. Notable for its fallible narration, the Kurosawa film employed flashbacks that obfuscated the truth.

For all intents and purposes, The Woodsman is lying too. The aspiring actor, as a sideline, drives a schnitzel truck, selling the phallic-shaped snacks("schnitzel", by the way, is slang for penis) to unsupervised children who excitedly follow the vehicle that seemingly lures them away from their parents.

In the actor's version of events, Red rides her bike past the depressed thespian without his notice, too overcome with grief by what he perceived as a disastrous audition, and yet, the coincidence seems too great that the axe-wielding actor should end up at her grandmother's place in what looks very much like a home invasion.

(Did the filmmaker adopt the moniker from "The Woodsman", the 2004 movie about a reformed child molester, with Kevin Bacon?) The moviegoer can either believe the official story(the actor claims that he was doing research for his role as a woodsman), or that he did see Red passing by his schnitzel truck and followed her back to grandmother's house.

Even worse, in "Hoodwinked Too: Red vs. Evil", the wolf's lust for underaged children is made more explicit, remarking, "Let me tell you something about Goldilocks. That is not her natural hair color.

" Meanwhile, Red gets her period, which is suggested by how her cloak refashions itself into a long vertical line(meaning that her menstrual blood is trickling down) at the outset, as a preventive measure against falling off the bridge which leads to the training academy.

The ogre functions as a stand-in for the wolves of the world that a young girl like Red has to fend off.