In Brief: Brilliant. The best non-Pixar CGI film I’ve ever seen.

Written and Directed by Cory Edwards and Todd Edwards

---Cast:
Tara Strong as Red
Patrick Warburton as Wolf
Sally Struthers as Granny
David Ogden Stiers as Commissioner Flippers
Joel McCrary as Chief Grizzly
Andy Dick as Boingo

Despite all the lauds heaped onto movies like Shrek, I’ve never felt that it or any of the other CGI films offered by Dreamworks or 20th Century Fox can hold a candle to Pixar. Dreamworks films in particular, beginning with Antz and continuing with the Shrek movies, seemed to suffer from a sort of multiple personality disorder. While ostensibly kids’ films (or family films), Antz contained references to sexual fantasies, eating excrement, being a “tight-ass,” and so on. The Shrek movies contain references to bodily functions and sexuality that I don’t feel I’d feel comfortable with if I had children and took them to see it, not to mention moral themes that could be seen as confusing at best, or hypocritical at worst. Fox’s Ice Age was perhaps the most enjoyable non-Pixar film I’ve seen, but it was a bit paint-by-the-numbers, and resorted to cheating in its resolution, rather than exhibiting the tight writing of Pixar. Robots was similarly mediocre in its story. Writing, after all, is something that is downplayed in Hollywood, and the near-absence of it in discussions of Pixar’s great films, which tend to focus instead on its incredible animation and design, is just another example of this.

So I was delighted to see Hoodwinked! at an August 15th research screening. It’s one of the first films of the newly-formed Weinstein Company, formed in the aftermath of Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s exodus from Miramax, the company they previously founded.

While preparing the theater, the projectionist was running snippets of the film, and the scene I saw was so funny that I had to ask my supervisor if I could sit in on the film. Specifically, it was Red’s line to the Wolf after the lupine predator, whom she previously encountered in the woods, is exposed as masquerading as her Granny:

“Geez, what do I have to do, get a restraining order against you?!”

That scene and that line pretty much set up the tone of the film, which as you might’ve guessed, follows the same sort of “anachro-fantasy” as the Shrek films, in which classical medieval fairy tale settings are satirically mixed with modern-day elements and dialogue. The movie is told in media res, and as the movie opens, the forest police (anthropomorphized animals in uniform, of course) are cordoning off Granny’s house as a crime scene following the alleged attack of the Wolf upon Red and her Granny. What follows is a criminal investigation as Commissioner Flippers and Chief of Police Grizzly question each of the four participants in the event: Red, the Wolf, Granny, and the Woodsman, each of whom tells a story in flashback that adds a piece to the puzzle, while revealing surprising things about themselves, and how they all came together at Granny’s house. This gives the movie a Shrek-meets-The Usual Suspects-meets-Rashomon feel to it, except that whereas Rashomon and its copycats feature each character telling the same series of events in a way that differed according to their biases, Hoodwinked instead allows each character to focus on the unique journey each one took on their way to Granny’s house, sometimes running into of the other three, allowing us to see how their paths intersected at times prior to their final coming together at Granny’s.

Without giving away any of the particulars, Hoodwinked! has the same tightly-written plotting as any Pixar film, and is utterly hilarious. Gags like the one in which the Wolf rationalizes his behavior by saying, “Hey, what can I say? I was raised by wolves” before we are shown an old family photo with the infant wolf will please young and old viewers equally, and there’s plenty of references that will amuse older viewers that will sail right over the kids’ heads without offending parents, like when a casting director tells an aspiring actor with a thick Slavic accent that they’ll use him in a Hercules Goes Bananas-type vein. The film lacks the deep heart, theme or characterization that epitomizes the Pixar films, but goes for an emphasis on comedy and action, and excels that it. Parents who are averse to cartoon violence may not love the scenes with Red showing off her kung fu skills, or some of the action scenes that wrap up the film, but unlike the Shrek films, there are no references to sexuality or bodily functions that I can remember, and if marketed right, this film could get the Weinstein Company off on the right foot.

According to IMDB, the release date in the States is Christmas. Sounds pretty good, especially the lack of flatulence humor. I'll keep an eye out for it.

I can't wait. I missed the first ten or fifteen minutes, during which Red gave her side of the story to the police, so I'd like to see the whole thing.

Slightly OT, but just a few comments on your descriptions of other non- Pixar films.

My feeling on Antz was that it was MARKETED as a family film, but that was NOT the filmmakers' intention at all. There are exceedingly few jokes in Antz that children can understand. Adding to the confusion was it was released at the same time as A Bug's Life, which was a family film and had similar themes.

Regarding Shrek, I agree with you that I found the message kind of bonkers: We shouldn't judge people by appearances, but it's okay to make fun of short people?

Antz was released almost two months before A Bug's Life.

And yeah, the jokes at the expense of Faarquad's height were one of the things I was getting at with Shrek.

We screened this film again Wednesday night, and this time, I got to see the whole thing. It was just as great, except that they changed a lot of the voices for some reason. I didn't really notice much a difference with Anne Hathaway and Glenn Close doing Red and Granny this time around (then again, it's hard to compare when the last time I saw it was in August), but Jim Belushi is just AWFUL as the Woodsman. I don't know the name of the guy they had in the original version, but he was good. Belushi's vague German/Austrian accent, on the other hand, is just awful. Maybe they changed it because they were afraid kids wouldn't understand him with the accent? Well, I sure didn't have a problem understanding the first guy, and Belushi is no improvement. At times it sounds like he has no accent at all.

Just bought the DVD, this movie is a hoot.

The puns are funny.

The policeman is a bear. (A CB lingo term for police is "bear")

The Stork's first name is "Bill" (get it?)

The storyline was the funniest I've ever seen in a long time.

Having been watching the DVD with the commentary earlier today, there was mention of the intent to make a sequel. A bit of research on IMDB revealed that such is in production and is currently slated for a January 2010 release. There have been recasts for two of the returning characters. Red will be voiced by Hayden Panettiere (Claire on Heroes) and the Woodsman will be voiced by Martin Short. Among the other returning characters are the Wolf, Granny, Nicky Flippers, Twitchy, Boingo, and Japeth (the goat with the interchangable horns). Judging by the information currectly available, the primary focus will be on the story of Hansel and Gretel.

I'm watching the film now on Cartoon Network.

When Wolf accidentally lights all the sticks of dynamite in his mining cart, he desperately tries to throw them all out of the cart before they ignite. Isn't dynamite so unstable that it can explode when it impacts something, or even (if that episode of Lost is accurate) when it's simply moved?

The creators cheat a bit with the flashback format in which each of the suspects is interrogated. After the big Austrian skier drops Granny off the cliff, he radios to his comrades that he has done so, and says, "Now we go after the little red hooded girl." But this is a flashback to events witnessed by Granny, as she is relating them to the cops. She didn't witness that last part.

The dynamite in that episode of Lost was in poor condition. Regular dynamite is quite stable. The whole point of the stuff is to provide the explosive power of nitroglycerine in a package that won't go off if it gets jostled too much.

Thanks. As I recall, it was unstable because it was "sweating" because of the heat. Does this mean that dynamite is not used in certain geographic locations whose temperature is above a certain level?

IIRC, it had decomposed after several hundred years

The sequel came out a couple of weeks ago. I haven't gotten a chance to see it though. It's prospects don't look very good, as the box office take so far is a paltry 6.9 megs and Rotten Tomatoes has it at 11%. Can anyone confirm whether it has a bad case of sequelitis, or is it being unjustly maligned?

It's worse than a bad case of sequelitis. The returning characters are apparently now all working together as agents of either a private detective agency or a government agency of some type. You know how it goes. The actors are not really playing the same characters, but rather the same "type" of characters (who also happen to have the same name) in a totally unrelated storyline.

To be fair, Nicky Flippers offered them to come work for him in such an organization at the end of the first movie, so it's consistent with that.

Haven't seen the sequel, though.