6.4 | / 10 |
Users | 3.5 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
An updated re-telling of the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood." The satire begins where the fable last left off, as there's always more to every tale than meets the eye! Furry and feathered cops from the animal world, Chief Grizzly and Detective Bill Stork, investigate a domestic disturbance at Granny's cottage, involving a girl, a wolf and an axe. The charges are many: breaking and entering, disturbing the peace, intent to eat, and wielding an axe without a license. Not to mention, this case might be tied to the elusive "Goody Bandit" who has been stealing the recipes of goody shops everywhere.
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Glenn Close, Jim Belushi, Patrick Warburton, Anthony AndersonFamily | 100% |
Comedy | 85% |
Animation | 80% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Mystery | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080i
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
French: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
DVD copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Playing fast and loose with the time honored tropes found in the works of the Brothers Grimm and their storytelling kin is nothing new. After all, people like Jay Ward were delighting kids of all ages with Fractured Fairy Tales on Rocky and Bullwinkle back in those “dark ages” of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine took a decidedly revisionist approach, inspired by Bruno Bettelheim, with a bevy of famous folktales in Into the Woods, the celebrated Tony Award winning musical. And of course animated films have long utilized fairy tales and folktales as a foundation for wild and wacky adventures. Disney loves to revisit classic yarns of yore, of course. While their earliest animated features tended to be based on more literary efforts like Collodi’s Pinocchio or Salten’s Bambi or indeed even Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, they slowly moved onto more familiar characters from the man many credit with founding the fairy tale genre, Charles Perrault. Many of the best animated films of the past few decades have been culled from source material at the very least tangentially related to fairy tales. And Perrault himself, as well as the Grimm Brothers who also published their version, might be credited with at least the germ of the idea behind Hoodwinked!, a sort of Jay Ward meets Akira Kurosawa (no, I’m not kidding) remake of Little Red Riding Hood.
It's a bit hard to separate transfer issues—which are for the most part fine, obviously, this being a feature done entirely in the digital realm—from the actual animation, which, as noted above, is far from state of the art. In terms of the transfer itself, delivered in 1080i (more about which later) via an AVC codec, we have a wonderfully sharp and clear image. But what exactly has been transferred? This is really a bare bones effort at times. While colors are nicely saturated and often wonderfully varied, all of the character surfaces look rubbery, including (to a somewhat lesser extent) the furry creatures. Indeed, the entire film seems cut from the same amorphous textural cloth. Everything is smooth, shiny, and without any real delineating detail. Characters move stiffly, are almost comically placed within their environments at times, and the whole thing has the look at times of something a child might have attempted with Scratch or Movie Maker (and, yes, I'm exaggerating—but not by much). Especially egregious in this regard are the often shoddy looking backgrounds, which really resemble sketches more than fully rendered drawings. All of this said, there is a certain nascent style at work here that a bigger budget could have helped ameliorate. Hopefully the new Hoodwinked! outing will have addressed this issue, which is one of the first film's major undoings. In terms of the transfer itself, this is perhaps the first major (or at least relatively major) feature film Blu-ray (as opposed to television releases) which is in 1080i, as opposed to 1080p. That does create some intermittent combing artifacts throughout the film, especially in segments with quick, frenetic motion. There's also noticeable shimmer on some of the fur rendering throughout the film.
Hoodwinked!'s lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is fairly spry and immersive and it includes a charming song score by Todd Edwards that is one of the film's highlights. While the soundtrack doesn't offer the whiz-bang surround activity of the best Disney-Pixar and Dreamworks efforts, it nonetheless has consistent and sometimes quite inventive use of all channels, and it provides a very enjoyable experience at times. The film is filled with some great sound effects, and perhaps surprisingly some robust LFE (there's a recurring avalanche that crops up in several of the recountings), and those literally rumble through the surround channels with a fair amount of gusto. Voices are consistently recorded and well placed throughout the soundfield, and the music and song score is very well recorded and excellently mixed.
In what may be a first for a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack that I've personally reviewed, the SD-DVD version of the film contains the bulk of the supplements:
On the Blu-ray:
Hoodwinked! is one of those glass half full, glass half empty situations. The screenplay and voicework here are absolutely marvelous and very enjoyable. It's the animation which lowers this a notch (or several) below where it would be otherwise. With a bigger budget, the Edwards Brothers are an animation team to keep your eye on. Despite its flaws, there's enough here to make Hoodwinked! Recommended.
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