Hoodwinked!

2005 Shrek rip-off

Rating: 11/20

Plot: There's a Goody Bandit on the loose somewhere in a fairy tale forest (Psst! It's more than likely Andy Dick.) and after a disturbance involving Little Red Riding, her granny, Puddy from Seinfeld, and a portly lumberjack, a police bear gets their stories and attempts to get to the bottom of things.

I swear that I saw this on a plane and sort of enjoyed it. Maybe it's just the rare movie that is better seen several thousand feet in the air. I do like the Rashomon structure as well as a few of the copious film references. More than a few of those (Matrix again?) were tired. The animation has an unfortunate ugliness with plasticky characters and a backdrop that looks like it's straight from an early 2000 video game. Additionally, the characters just don't move right, and their faces lack any personality whatsoever. The voice work, although the cast seems to be doing its very best (Andy Dick sounds like a transvestite), just doesn't work either. I don't like the movie's style, and the humor is really all over the place. It's almost like they threw in snowboarding grandmothers and every sort of quirky character they could think of in order to appeal to everybody, the throwing-darts-and-hope-some-stick strategy of comedy writing. Unfortunately, the movie just isn't very funny at all. My least favorite character was that annoying singing goat until Twitchy was introduced about ten minutes later. Add some yucky songs to, I'm guessing, pad the length so that it's movie sized. My biggest question: Would most children even be able to figure out what was going on in this movie?