Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil (2011)

Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil arrived in 2011 as the sequel nobody had requested to a modest 2005 hit, and it conducts itself accordingly. The animation is stiff, the jokes arrive on schedule, and the enterprise carries the weary air of a project that survived a lawsuit before it survived a release date. By the standards of the fractured fairy tale it is competently assembled and entirely forgettable. The quality is low. The ideological weather is more interesting.

Red remains the central hero, and the film surrounds her with the Sister Hoods, an all-female training order, while Granny and the witch Verushka drive most of the plotting. Fairy-tale gender roles get a gentle shake. The villain's motive is professional jealousy toward a woman who outshone her. This is girl-power by reversal, inherited from a tradition that predates the current cultural vocabulary, and it never pauses to argue a thesis. The film has no interest in lecturing anyone. It wants to sell truffles and toys.

Elsewhere the social ledger is blank. The cast is a parade of white European folklore figures with no commentary attached. There are no queer characters, no engagement with race, no climate anxieties, no swipes at corporate power, and no neurodivergent framing. The one place the film gestures toward a modern sensibility, it retreats. Hansel and Gretel grow enormous on enchanted truffles, and their punishment is a forced regimen of diet and exercise, which the film presents as justice. That is a message, delivered without a shred of self-awareness.

So we are left with a sequel that is mildly progressive in the way of a 1990s cartoon and otherwise a product of its commercial moment. It scores its points for heroines and takes none elsewhere. A curiosity, briefly, and then nothing.