Hoodwinked (Widescreen Edition) Reviews

Hoodwinked fuses the classic fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood with the crisscrossing storylines of film noir --pretty ambitious stuff for a computer-animated cartoon. The police cordon off Grandma's cottage and an amphibious version of William Powell named Nicky Flippers (voiced by David Ogden Stiers, M*A*S*H ) begins interrogating the suspects: A Little Red in bell-bottoms (Anne Hathaway, Ella Enchanted ), a Wolf turned investigative journalist (Patrick Warburton, The Woman Chaser ), a snow-boarding Granny (Glenn Close, 101 Dalmatians ), and a dimwitted would-be Woodsman (Jim Belushi, Curly Sue ), each of whom have very different reasons for ending up in that cottage living room. The visual style of Hoodwinked mixes a clunky, video-game look with an homage to the stop-motion puppetry of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and other Rankin-Bass holiday specials. While sometimes awkward, there are also moments of surreal beauty, such as when a depressed Red wanders through a field of blue and red flowers--and moments of lunatic comedy, such as the Schnitzel song, which is irresistibly bizarre. The Shrek -style pop-culture references grow annoying, but the left-field goofiness of a yodeling goat points toward a far more distinct and delightful comic world. Also featuring the voices of Anthony Anderson ( Kangaroo Jack ), rapper Xzibit, and an especially witty turn by Andy Dick ( NewsRadio ) as a deceptively cute bunny rabbit. --Bret Fetzer