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Red:
What big ears you have.
Wolf: The better… to hear your criticisms with, my dear.
The only
really funny gags occur in the famous meeting between Granny
disguised wolf and Red whose own back and forth take a turn that
will induce quite a chuckle out of the audience. Patrick Warburton
gives a tight performance as one of the few characters in the movie
with a personality and thanks to the man’s ability to sound like a
dumb jock most of the time when acting, he makes the wolf sound like
a blowhard braggart looking for a big score when he mistakes Red for
a Recipe Bandit. Though not an instant sell and kind of a rip off of
Scrat from “Ice Age,” Twitchy is a funny straight man, the chipmunk
who talks so quickly, he’s impossible to understand most of the
time, and the mishap with dynamite was a funny little gag that won
me over.
It’s a shame because
as an animation geek, I always go in to every animated movie with a
sense of skepticism but an even better sense of optimism and
“Hoodwinked!” held my interest for a good long time. And for the
first five minutes I laughed quite a bit. Then the movie started
experiencing plot progression and suddenly I got the feeling I’d
been hoodwinked in to watching a “Shrek” rip off. Because regardless
of what the Looney Tunes has established long before the Dreamworks
ever introduced us to the ogre, fairy tale spoofs will be compared
to it. And rightfully. Because every fairy tale spoof attempts to go
down that same road. “Hoodwinked!” is bad. It’s a poorly animated
farce with an inexplicable great cast that lends a “Rashomon” twist
exploring the different angles to the climax of “Red Riding Hood.”
It also squeezes in a paper thin Maguffin about a recipe bandit
stealing all the restaurants’ recipes running them out of business.
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It
could be one of the characters in this movie. Meanwhile we
have forgettable music numbers, a very vapid Red Riding Hood
whose only trait is the fact that she wants to be seen like
an adult, and a really rapid talking chipmunk working with
the wolf. Who is the recipe bandit? Who cares? We get to see
a snow boarding grandma, a karate fighting Red, a wolf who
happens to be a reporter, and the writers cribbing from the
Looney Tunes episodes generously. Laughing yet?
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It’s
certainly not “Doogal” levels of pure dreck, but for studios
inventing and revolutionizing new technology every year, it’s about
time we see more quality with our animated children’s flicks. Plus
characters like the talking rabbit and the police stork just feel
shoe horned in to the script for more distractions for the audience.
And for a film that was pretty good at the time, studios just want
to do nothing but imitate that damn green ogre and present an “edgy”
look at the common fairy tale. What emerges most of the time is this
flaccid almost laughless little snore fest.
In spite of a few honest laughs here and there, "Hoodwinked!" is a
relatively piss poor production with average voice work and characters
who feel barely fleshed out, and tacked on to give kids something to
giggle at. I wish I loved it.
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