Movie: Hoodwinked

Hoodwinked is one of three films I’ve ever seen for which, as soon as it had finished, I went back to the beginning to listen to the audio commentary. I only ever do this when a movie I expected to be bad turns out to be better or more affecting than my wildest expectations. (The other two are Riding in Cars With Boys and Accepted.)

Actually, with Hoodwinked, I went back to the end to listen to the audio commentary, as the resume feature picked up at the point I’d left off on, in the middle of the credits. I learned there that a sequel was being planned, which made me pretty happy. (It's slated for 2010.) If it’s anything like its predecessor, it will be full of self-referential, clever moments that could only have been crammed into a story as bizarre and familiar as “Little Red Riding Hood” by writers, directors and editors as familiar with the bizarre and familiar gestalt of contemporary culture and pop phenoms as with the preceding decades of film-school features that set the standards they’re “filming” by.

The movie starts in media res, in the “what big eyes you have” climax of the fable. Red Riding Hood shows up to find the wolf in Grandma’s bed, wearing a Grandma mask (which I thought at first might be Grandma’s actual face, somehow removed by the wolf – eww, gross – but which turns out to be plain plastic). Grandma stumbles out of the closet bound and gagged after Red insists the wolf isn’t her granny, and in a brilliantly absurd and unsettling move, just as all three main characters are about to begin what promises to be a knock-down-drag-out fight in the living room, an apparently insane, screaming, axe-wielding woodsman in lederhosen crashes in through the window, wielding his axe, wearing lederhosen and screaming. Insanely.

This was pretty clever, and the sudden cut from this to the blackout title and outside-the-house-cops-milling-everywhere, “steadycam-filming” investigation beginning, made it even more clever – especially since everything is CGI, not steadycam, or any other kind of cam. I like that attention to detail and willingness to go beyond what’s necessary. (Like the outtakes at the end of Toy Story II.) What got me, though, what convinced me that I could settle in in front of this movie with a small bowl of ice cream or a quesadilla – or, to tell the truth, both – was the sudden appearance of the frog special investigator, Nicky Flippers. The suit, the debonair attitude, the shiny froggy skin, the pencil mustache – all references, and obvious ones for those in-the-know (invisible to the uninitiated), to the Thin Man movies.

The commentary admits this, and points out the presence of the court reporter dog as a reference to Asta, a terrier that shows up in all the Thin Man movies. The wolf is patterned after Fletch, and the commentary also refers to Wallace and Gromit’s “The Wrong Trousers,” saying the writers insisted that others involved in creating the movie watch it. Those are my kind of writers.

The story of how the wolf, Red, Grandma and the axe-wielding, lederhosen-wearing, screaming maniac woodsman, end up in Grannie’s living room, gets told four times from each of the characters’ perspectives. Red’s is first, followed by the wolf, the woodsman and finally, Grandma. Yes, it’s like Rashomon.

The in-between moments are stellar, and there are enough of them, and ridiculous enough, that you don’t notice the holes in the plot.

I mean, I assume there are some, but I didn’t notice any.

And who cares if there are.

Each of the character’s stories is entertaining on its own, with Red’s the most straightforward and each subsequent story both less and more practical – less practical in that the characters are involved in increasingly silly situations, and more practical in that the absurdities present and unremarked-on in Red’s story are explained piece by piece.

The mystery lasts awhile, but the pleasure of knowing who the villain is starts during the lederhosen-wearer’s version of the story, at the latest. Around this point, the villain starts going over the evil-genius edge, and by the big reveal, the actor who plays the villain (you can tell I’m trying hard not to spoil it for you here) has made his character into a perfect insane evil character, a great balance of the mad scientist’s attention to the big, crazy picture, and his focus on the details of his insecurity. (He makes one of his henchmen change his name from “Keith” to “Boris,” for instance, mocking Keith for having an unscary name. He stops to consider this in the middle of his big-action ending.)

So you figure out who the bad guy is relatively early on, but it’s all to your good. “We weren’t trying to do Memento,” they said in the commentary. (Good.)

They call themselves the “Napoleon Dynamite of animated films,” thanks to their lower production values and lower budget, but admit there’s no way of thinking so far about independent animated movies.

Well, I look forward to that day if this is the product of that out-of-the-Disney thinking.

Bring it on, honey.