*** 1/2

Hoodwinked is Little Red Riding Hood with some new characters that add new excitement to the story. I especially liked that it used other fairy tale characters such as the Three Little Pigs, Fuzzy Wuzzy, and Peter Cottontail remade as Boingo the Bunny. Granny also has a whole new bag, and it’s not filled with goodies-it’s filled with extremes!

This movie starts at the end when Red (Ann Hathaway of The Princess Diaries 1 and 2) is going to visit Granny (Glenn Close of the 101 Dalmatians movies) but finds the wolf (Patrick Warburton from The Emperors New Groove) in a granny costume. Then Granny comes out of the closet bound and gagged seconds before the woodsman comes crashing through the window yelling “Ahhhhhhhh!” and carrying an axe. During the confusion someone steals Granny’s famous treat recipe and the rest of the movie is about Nicky Flippers (a smooth detective played by David Ogden Stiers) and Chief Grizzly (gruffly played by Xzibit) trying to find out just who the thief is. They interview all 4 of the suspects and with each story it all starts to slide together like pieces of a puzzle.

Compared to Shrek, this is a different format but it gives the same kind of feeling. They might have been trying to imitate Shrek but it was better because it had a little bit better music, it was a little bit funnier, and I liked the bad guy better, but I won’t say who it was! (My mom didn’t agree with me on this-she liked Shrek better because of Donkey.)

They could have improved it by deleting the stupid singing goat, but other than that it was pretty good. I give this 3 1/2 stars. It is rated PG for some mild action and thematic elements.

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