Hoodwinked is the ugliest film you need to watch

Don't judge a fairy tale by its cover

Cory Edward’s infamously ugly Hoodwinked, however, is a lesson in subverting expectations. Released 20 years ago in January 2006, this animated musical comedy takes everything you know about Little Red Riding Hood and chucks it in the trash. Instead of Red being presented as a frail, naive girl, this 12-year-old (voiced by Anne Hathaway) has a black belt and isn’t afraid to karate chop any fairy tale creature stupid enough to mess with her. The rest of the characters also get glow-ups from their original stories. Granny (Glenn Close) knows how to shred the slopes as though she belongs in an SSX game, and the Big Bad Wolf (Patrick Warburton) isn’t all that bad, he’s just an investigative reporter. Albeit one that’s willing to do bad things to get a story.

While Hoodwinked does follow the typical tale of Little Red Riding Hood returning home to find grandma missing and a wolf in her clothing, the main premise is actually about the “Goody Bandit,” a thief who has been stealing all of the savory and sweet snacks in the woodlands. Hoodwinked works backwards, explaining the reason why the Wolf is in Grandma’s house (he suspects Red is the Bandit), and why Red was rushing to her house in the first place (she fears her Granny’s goodies are in danger from the Bandit). The narrative beats of Perrault’s fairytale quickly turn on their heads.

The biggest subversion in Edward’s musical comedy, however, is that despite it being one of the ugliest animated films ever made, it’s also beautifully earnest. Coming out shortly after the first two Shrek films, Hoodwinked also leaned into a fairy tale parody. But unlike Shrek it didn’t lean hard enough for the fairy tale it was parodying to lose its sentimentality completely. Little Red Riding Hood may be a badass, but she is still, at her core, a vulnerable girl trying to find her place in the world. Even the bumbling, yodel-loving Woodsman (Jim Belushi), often depicted as kind-hearted and determined in retellings of the tale, doesn’t lose this side of him completely.

The film was produced by Edwards' independent production company, Blue Yonder Films, with most of the animation work outsourced to the Philippines. Hoodwinked had a shockingly low budget for an animated film of that time at just under $8 million, which more or less explains why the visuals look undercooked at best. But Edwards worked within the limitations. He knew Hoodwinked couldn’t match the quality of other computer-animated films of the time, and instead attempted to imitate the look of stop-motion. As Edwards says in an interview with Animation World Network, if he could tap into the nostalgia of “photographed miniatures in stop motion” then the characters wouldn’t need to look overly realistic. “We’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot trying to put every freckle and hair on photoreal creatures.”

This lack of Hollywood funding (and interference) also gave his co-writer/brother Todd Edwards, the creative freedom to tell the story they wanted. The brothers give Little Red Riding Hood an intriguing new spin by structuring the film’s story beats follow like a police procedural drama, with Todd Edwards citing Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction as an inspiration in that same AWN interview. (The Weinstein Company later signed on as a distributor, but Edwards was able to resist any meddling in his film beyond a mandate to recast the voice actors with more well-known stars.)

The outcome is a movie that, while deeply ugly, is fairly sincere. While Shrek’s directors treats its fairy tale inspirations as something to overcome with potty humor and sly digs, Edwards used them as a vehicle to narrate a story in a subversive way that brings something new to the tale. That’s also arguably why, Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil was such a commercial and unimaginative failure. Instead of a story worth telling, it was too busy making fun of itself to have anything worth saying.

Hoodwinked was never going to win any awards, but the legacy it’s left behind is that of an animated film that, despite being ugly as sin, gets everything else right. Hoodwinked is perfect, even when it’s not.