Hoodwinked! (2005)

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. For this story, we begin at the end. Furry and feathered cops from the animal world investigate a domestic disturbance at Granny's (Glenn Close) cottage, involving a girl named Red (Anne Hathaway), a wolf (Patrick Warburton), and an axe. The charges are many: breaking and entering, disturbing the peace, intent to eat, and wielding an axe without a license. Not to mention, this case might be tied to the elusive Goody Bandit who has been stealing the recipes of goody shops everywhere. Hilarity ensues as we meet characters we've never met before, including Boingo (Andy Dick) the cute bunny, Chief Grizzly (Xhibit) who is willing to arrest anyone, a very high strung squirrel named Twitchy, an enchanted goat that can only sing, and Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Steirs) who is trying to decipher what actually happened. All the while, the Goody Bandit is on the loose, trying to accomplish his master plan.

Trivia: In the scene where Nicky Flippers, played by David Ogden Stiers, needs to understand what Twitchy the squirrel is saying, he uses a tape recorder to slow down Twitchy's speech so that he can find out what Twitchy is saying and save the day. This is a reference to A Circle of Children (1977). In that movie, a teacher named, Dan Franklin, also played by Stiers, needs to understand what a young boy is saying and uses a tape recorder to slow down the boys speech so that he can find out what the boy is saying and save the day. The scene where Boingo tells Keith to change his name was not scripted "Keith, darnit change your name, please, that's not scary and I'm embarrassed to say it. Boris, try that. Keith, ya know, OOOO Watch out for Keith!". It was ad-libbed by Andy Dick while recording his lines. According to Todd Edwards at Anderson University's Chapel, this is the first fully independently-funded computer-animated feature film.

I know this movie was independently funded so they had to cut some corners but the computer graphics really disappointed me. At best they were a little bit better then cable television CGI cartoons that have sprouted up recently, which is a shame because this was a funny well written story. Little Red Riding Hood gets the Rashoman treatment (four different stories of the same events told by four different characters watching out for their own interests). The funniest thing is that the four main characters (Red, the Wolf, the Woodsman, and Granny), although they have their funny moments, act as straight men to the hilarity of the secondary characters. So little kids will like it because it is well paced and has action and squirrels and frogs and stuff like that, bigger kids may get most of the jokes, and the adults will like it for the story (although they will probably figure out who the bad guys is pretty quickly, it is still worth watching).