Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Little Red Riding Hood: A classic story, but there's more to every tale than meets the eye. Before you judge a book by its cover, you've got to flip through the pages. In the re-telling of this classic fable, the story begins at the end of the tale and winds its way back. Chief Grizzly and Detective Bill Stork investigate a domestic disturbance at Granny's cottage, involving a karate-kicking Red Riding Hood, a sarcastic wolf and an oafish Woodsman.
Hoodwinked! earns points for its clever Rashomon-style retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, weaving a mystery narrative through fractured perspectives — a genuinely fun structural conceit for a family film. The plot is inventive enough to stand out in the mid-2000s animated landscape. However, the voice acting is serviceable at best, lacking the polish or memorable performances of contemporaries. The cinematography is a clear weak point — the CGI animation was notoriously cheap and technically poor even by 2005 standards, with stiff character models and bland environments that fell well short of Pixar or DreamWorks output. Novelty is above average for its genre-subversion and mystery framing but not truly exceptional. The ending delivers a satisfying reveal consistent with its whodunit structure, though it doesn't transcend its modest ambitions.