20th Anniversary of Hoodwinked! (Limited Release date: December 16, 2005)

Almost twenty years ago, while my wife and I were on vacation, we found ourselves flipping through the channels on our room's television, and we stumbled upon a movie that reminded us of Shrek (already a few years old at this time), but instead of lampooning fairy tales in general, this movie focused on "Little Red Riding Hood," specifically. Upon our arrival back at home, we looked up the movie to secure the DVD, thus allowing us to finally watch Hoodwinked^* in its entirety.

While I've already compared Hoodwinked to Shrek, I need to point out that, while Shrek was more or less simply poking fun at the genre, Hoodwinked attempted something rather different: it attempted to redefine the classic story by retelling the story from each character's point of view, with each retelling offering a new piece of important information. While this technique was hardly new (the 1950 Japanese classic Rashomon is specifically stated to be an inspiration in Hoodwinked's Wikipedia entry), it was certainly a novel approach to the classic children's story.

The movie begins with the climactic scene of "Little Red Riding Hood" (more or less): Red confronts the Wolf, who is disguised as Red's grandmother. Before the Wolf can attack, the Woodsman comes in swinging his axe (I left out the fact that Grandma jumps out of the closet all tied up, but this is admittedly NOT in any version of the Red Riding Hood story I'd previously been aware of). The next thing we know, the police have arrived, and all of our characters are being questioned about the incident. The first half of the movie then proceeds to show (from each character's point of view) just how everything got to that point.

This allows us to meet some new characters, as well as to introduce traits in our "main" characters that will come as a surprise to fans of the original tale. For example, Granny is a competitor in extreme sports, participating in a skiing competition that day (while also bringing goodies to her fellow athletes). The Woodsman is a failed actor named Kurt who isn't terribly adept with an axe. The Wolf is an investigative reporter (and a clear homage to the Chevy Chase version of Fletch), trying to catch the scoop on a series of robberies targeting purveyors of sweets (Granny is said to be one of the best in the business, although she has not yet been a victim, while Red serves as Granny's delivery service).

The Wolf's retelling of the story offers us the breakout character of the film (certainly in my opinion): Twitchy. Twitchy is a squirrel who serves as Wolf's photographer, and is voiced by the film's director, Cory Edwards (who also co-wrote the story and screenplay), whose voice has been mechanically sped up to be almost (but not quite) unintelligible. While there is comedy to spare in this film, Twitchy provides more than his fair share. He even inspired me to create a fake "inspirational poster" shortly after we got our copy of the DVD. You can find that here.

All of this leads up to the second half of the film, as the mystery of the "goody bandit" (as he's called in the film) is finally revealed, and the thief reveals his own larger plans. But I'll leave that spoiler unrevealed here, in hopes that you'll seek out the movie for yourself. It's definitely worth a look, and features the voice talents of Anne Hathaway, Patrick Warburton, Glenn Close, Jim Belushi, and other notables. This fact is especially noteworthy as Hoodwinked was among the first CGI films to be completely independently funded, because it shows that they weren't skimping on paying for well-known names.

Sadly, Hoodwinked seems not to be available for free streaming as I write this, although you can buy the DVD quite cheaply (I've seen it for as little as a dollar, in fact!), or for a bit more, it can be purchased to rent or own digitally. With any luck, as the movie hits its 20th anniversary in the next couple of weeks, it might be brought back into the streaming service rotation for a bit, making the question of whether or not to pay for the experience an academic one.

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^*Technically, the movie's name is Hoodwinked!, with the exclamation point, but writing with that mark causes my computer to try to put capital letters where I don't want them, so I'm using "Hoodwinked" throughout this post for convenience.