Hoodwinked!
Written by Cory Edwards & Todd Edwards and Tony Leech
Directed by Cory Edwards and Todd Edwards and Tony Leech
The Weinstein Co.
2006
Rating:


Theoretically, the advent of computer-generated animation and its relative cheapness should be a good thing. CG should do for independent animators what Digital Video did for independent filmmakers: now anyone who has a story should be able to tell it. Of course, that also means that filmmakers without stories to tell can parade feature-length gimmicks as well, but if Disney can make bad animated movies and even worse computer-animated ones, there's no reason why indie animators shouldn't have their shot.

"Hoodwinked!" isn't nearly as bad and intellectually offensive as the garish "Chicken Little," but it's not intellectually stimulating either, even if the spirit of "Rashomon" has been summoned by critics to describe its needlessly Byzantine plot. To describe "Hoodwinked!" as "Rashomon"-like is a horribly reductive view of Akira Kurosawa's 1951 masterpiece. In "Rashomon," four different accounts of an ambush-rape-murder are offered, calling into question whether "the truth" can ever really be objectively found. "Hoodwinked!" uses Kurosawa's structure as a lazy plot device and nothing more.

In the post-modern fashion of "Shrek" — although not in the deconstructive manner of "Wicked" — "Hoodwinked!" offers its version of how Red (voiced by Anne Hathaway) came to find the Wolf (Patrick Warburton) in her grandmother's bed, Granny (Glen Close) tied up in the closet and a seemingly homicidal Woodsman (Jim Belushi) crashing through the window. All four are held for questioning by froggy Poirot-wannabe Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Stiers) in connection to a recent recipe-stealing spree, and how each of them came to be in that room will either clear their name or indict them as the Goody Bandit.

The different versions of what happened that day prove to fit together like a puzzle rather than create conflicting accounts. What's being called "Rashomon"-like is really just symptomatic of the filmmakers ADD: there's little character enlightenment through the characters' storytelling, just pointless plot culs-de-sac that aren't funny enough to warrant the structure. The mystery is solvable, even by children, from the first sequence, and the only real humor comes from the Wolf's derivative, squirrel sidekick and a goat who's cursed to sing in exposition, the film's nicest touch. "Hoodwinked!" at least knows enough to deconstruct the "Part of Your World" song number that has opened most Disney musicals since "The Little Mermaid," but the "South Park" boys already ripped that to shreds in 1999. And does Granny really have to be an extreme sports champion and the Woodsman a "method" actor? Those who think the idea of Granny extreme snowboarding is funny will most likely also find "Grandma's Boy" amusing.

Posted Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/hoodwinked