by Samuel Nichols, Contributing Writer
I have a lot of movie memories post-2010. That was right when I started watching the Oscars and really caring about the big-time pics at the box office. In 2012 I saw The Hunger Games, The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Hobbit all at midnight premieres. Since then, I have had so many incredible movie-going memories, but most of them involve a theater and a lot of friends and family. But in 2006, I couldn’t have been more than 10 years old, and I remember picking up my brother from a church event where he watched this movie called Hoodwinked! I knew nothing about the movie, but he came out of the church raving about it. In the 17 years since that night, I have seen Hoodwinked! more than any major animated hit from Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks, or Illumination. That’s because even now at 26 years old, despite its low scores, the movie is an absolute banger, and is this month’s pick for Another Person’s Treasure!
Pulling its story straight from Mother Goose books and tossing in a dash of CSI: Woodland Forrest, Hoodwinked! follows the perspective of several children’s story characters after a break-in at Granny Puckett’s home. There’s Little Red Riding Hood (Anne Hathaway), who is still seen as the innocent little girl despite her desires to get out of the wood and see the world. On the prowl for a big story is the Big Bad Wolf (Patrick Warburton), an undercover journalist. Then there’s the Woodsman (Jim Belushi), wanting to make his to big break into acting. Finally, Grandma Puckett (Glenn Close) is hiding a double life that keeps her family at bay. All the while, a colorful cast of characters including Chief Grizzly (Xzibit), Wolf’s photographer Twitchy the Squirrel (Cory Edwards), Detective Stork (Anthony Anderson), Japeth the singing goat (Benjy Gaither), the little bunny entrepreneur Boingo (Andy Dick), and private investigator Flippers (David Ogden Stiers) have parts to play in this mystery. Trusts are broken. Goodies are eaten. Stories are told, retold, and somehow told a third and fourth time without being boring. All the while, a plot is uncovered for one suspect to create a monopoly on all the deserts in town.
First of all, did you see that cast list? Holy crap! I know one thing that always makes or breaks a movie is who you have in front of the camera or in the recording studio, but holy crap this is a dream team for an animated movie. You had early-20s Hathaway to attract some younger viewers. Close and Belushi bring in some established star power. Toss in some more up-and-comers like Warburton, and Anderson, and this movie has talent coming out of it’s ears. While I wouldn’t call all of them adept vocal actors, not a single one of them seems out of place here. Each of them bring a unique and positive energy to the mix that adds to the movie as a whole. Particularly, I’m always impressed with Hathaway and Xzibit. They take on parts that could be pretty one-note, in the young girl growing up and the beat police chief who just wants to arrest someone, and make them fun and unique.
Speaking of fun and unique, there is plethora of fun and bizarre sequences that play out on screen. You get everything from kung fu fights between heroes and villains to blues montages. There are fun chase sequences and a few scary elements too thrown in for good measure. What makes it even more interesting is when you see one person’s view point on how a story played out, and then a few minutes later it gets juxtaposed against someone else’s perspective. For a little animation movie, a lot of craftsmanship went into making this.
You gotta give props to the animation team here too. Yes, a lot of the people can look a bit clunky and like a claymation nightmare, but the animal characters like the Wolf, Boing, the Chief, and Flippers all have an incredible amount of detail and texture to them.
But what really puts this movie over the top for me is the humor and comedy. The whole movie is just dripping with sequences that get a laugh out of me. Whether its the wolf taking himself too seriously as a journalist, or the Woodsman bounding through the forrest working on his acting method, there is always something here to make you laugh. And isn’t that what a good adventure and fantasy should do: give you a good time and a chuckle every now and then?
So with all of these things this flick has going for me, why does it have such mediocre reviews? I think it goes back to the animation competition I mentioned earlier: There are so many great animation studios that have been putting out blockbusters the past two decades since this movie’s release that Hoodwinked! got buried. There was always a new Toy Story or Shrek movie to be seen. And that constant push to stay on top of those new releases can keep us from appreciating something smaller. If we let that push stay on top of us, we can forget to check out some of these lesser know pictures.
You can read more from Samuel Nichols, and follow him on Twitter and Letterboxd