Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

Hoodwinked Blu-ray Movie Review

You know you've been waiting for an animated version of 'Rashomon.'

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 27, 2011

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.

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is one of those epochal films whose very title has entered the public lexicon and become a glyph for differing points of view and never knowing objectively speaking what “really” happened. Hoodwinked! takes that idea and, while obviously not treating it as philosophically or in fact artistically as Kurosawa did, manages to recast Little Red Riding Hood in a sort of parallel universe (actually several of them) where everyone has their own point of view and nothing is as it seems, at least at first glance. The film actually starts with a more or less “standard” version of the story, but then Nicky Flippers (voiced by the wonderful David Ogden Stiers), a frog detective, shows up to question the “usual suspects” (another film which Hoodwinked! apes in style if not in content). Under the sometimes dryly sarcastic questioning of the green sleuth, each of the major characters in Red Riding Hood reveals different layers to the story, providing a new perspective on what has already been seen, and the original source material itself.

That concept in and of itself is quite delightful, but Hoodwinked! goes awry by introducing a whole other element to the basic Red Riding Hood mythos. In this version, all of the forest animals, and Red Riding Hood’s Granny herself, are cooks, each with top secret recipes that some “goody thief” has been purloining. It won’t take a rocket scientist to quickly figure out who the culprit is in this version, but suffice it to say the major characters are free of guilt, including the not so big bad Wolf. This added element may at least give the film a notch upon which to hang its hat and/or red riding hood, but it also introduces completely unfamiliar and odd seeming content into a story that is so well known the extracurricular subject matter may be off putting to some.

Where Hoodwinked! succeeds, and rather surprisingly at times, is in its decidedly anarchic spirit, filled with that same sort of two edged humor that Jay Ward was so brilliant at exploiting. There’s one level here for the kids, and another, often very funny, level for the adults. Brothers Cory and Todd Edwards developed their original story, eventually collaborating on the screenplay with their friend Tony Leech, and their sensibility is very much in the best tradition not only of Ward, but latter day phenomena like The Simpsons and the Dreamworks animation pieces, notably Shrek.

Speaking of Dreamworks, and its competitiors Disney-Pixar, what will probably be most disappointing to viewers is the rudimentary animation style of Hoodwinked!. Have just endured the pretty lamentable Alpha and Omega, I can say that Hoodwinked! isn’t exactly the worst looking piece of animation I’ve seen lately, but it’s far from inspiring. There’s a certain style here, something some (including the film’s creative staff) have likened to those old Rankin-Bass specials that were a staple of 1960’s and 1970’s television, but this feature was obviously done on a relatively miniscule budget, and it shows in the often entry-level animation. Especially lacking here are the backgrounds, which are just too simple and colorless to ever really invite the viewer into what should be an enchanted and even slightly ominous forest.

The voice work is largely stellar, with new “it” girl Anne Hathaway bringing a sort of sarcastic teen ambience to her Red Riding Hood. Patrick Warburton is a lovably goofy Wolf, sort of a cousin to the Bullwinkle of a generation or two ago. Glenn Close doesn’t have a bunch to do as Granny, but she creates a fun, crackly voiced character. Jim Belushi is full of bluster and buffoonery as The Woodsman. The supporting cast includes brief turns by Law and Order’s Anthony Anderson, Xzibit, Chazz Palminteri and Andy Dick.

Hoodwinked! managed to bring in over $100 million in boxoffice in its worldwide theatrical release, and a sequel is about to be released, if some legal wrangling between the Weinstein Company and the first film’s original producer can be worked out. The premise of the film is strong enough to build a franchise on, but hopefully the sequel, and any future outings, will spend some of that $100 million on better looking animation. As I mentioned in my review of Alpha and Omega, Disney-Pixar and Dreamworks have raised the bar so high in contemporary animation that efforts that would have been passable even a couple of decades ago now look hopelessly amateurish.

Hoodwinked Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

Hoodwinked Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

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:

• The True Behind the Scenes Story (SD; 29:52) is sort of an amped-up version of the DVD's making of featurette How to Make An Animated Feature Film.

On the DVD:

• Feature Commentary with both Edwards brothers and Tony Leech. It's very chatty, a bit too much so at times, but the Edwards brothers are very funny at times and Leech gets a few good punchlines in as well (as in taking credit for Warburton's funny pauses, since Leech edited the film).
• Deleted and Extended Scenes (SD; 9:36) with optional commentary by Cory Edwards, features some fun stuff, though nothing earth shattering.
• Critters Have Feelings Music Video (SD; 3:37)
• How to Make An Animated Feature Film (SD; 12:52) is most interesting in terms of how it is so enthusiastic about co-producer Maurice Kanbar, who's now locked in some legal maneuvers with the Weinsteins over the fate of the sequel.
• Theatrical Trailer

Hoodwinked Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.