Hoodwinked! (2005)

Released in 2005, Hoodwinked! takes the familiar tale of Little Red Riding Hood and runs it through the machinery of a police procedural, borrowing its structure from Rashomon and Pulp Fiction. Red Puckett is a karate-kicking delivery girl, her Granny a secret extreme-sports competitor, the Wolf a deadpan investigative reporter, and the Woodsman a childishly incompetent actor. The film was assembled independently on a modest budget, and its animation carries the flat, earnest look of a project that spent its money on the script. The script, to its credit, is clever. It revises a fairy tale, not history, which keeps it clear of any grander cultural claims.

The progressive currents here are gentle and largely incidental. Two Black performers, Xzibit and Anthony Anderson, lend their voices to supporting characters, though those characters are animals and the film never touches race as a subject. Red and Granny both subvert the passive archetypes of the source material, and the villain Boingo is a scheming entrepreneur who plans to add an addictive additive to stolen recipes before bulldozing the forest for a corporate empire. That is a light anti-corporate streak and a faint ecological one, delivered as plot mechanics instead of sermons.

What the film notably declines to do is lecture. Its central lesson, that we should not judge a book by its cover, arrives through mystery and slapstick, not through finger-wagging. There is no romantic subplot of any orientation, no meditation on body image, and the hyperactive squirrel Twitchy is played for laughs, not diagnosed. For a family animation from its era, it is remarkably untroubled by the urge to instruct. It simply wants to be a whodunit with a goat who sings.