Hoodwinked: “There’s More to Every Tale Than Meets the Eye”
Hoodwinked was one of my favorite movies as a child. My siblings and I must have seen the movie dozens of times. Directed by Cory Edwards and released in 2005, the story is adapted from Little Red Riding Hood, a classic fairy tale that is well-known and has been loved for centuries. Little Red Riding Hood is most iconically written by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.
Hoodwinked is quite obviously a parody of all fairy tales, but particularly follows the original Little Red Riding Hood, indulging in the irony of fairy tales as a whole and allowing us to see the classic story from the perspective of different characters. Through these different perspectives, we discover that not everything that we think we know about the original tale is what it seems.
In Little Red Riding Hood, the girl in the notorious red cloak, is sent to bring her sick grandmother food. On the journey to her grandmother’s cottage, a wolf who wants to eat the girl and the food stalks her. The wolf, upon learning that she is going to her grandmother’s cottage, distracts her to arrive before her, planning to eat Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and wait in her bed for the girl to arrive. When Little Red Riding Hood arrives, she notices that her grandmother looks very different and that something is wrong. When she interrogates the wolf about his appearance, he responds as the grandmother. In most versions of the story, the girl is eaten by the wolf, and some versions of the story end with a hunter saving the girl and her grandmother by cutting open the wolf’s abdomen.
Hoodwinked begins with Little Red Riding Hood, nicknamed “Red”, entering her grandmother’s cottage. The wolf is about to eat Red when suddenly her grandmother, Granny Pucket, jumps out of the closet, tied up, and a crazy woodsman jumps through the window yelling and swinging an axe. The house becomes a crime scene and the characters involved are questioned about what happened.
Red explains her side of the story first, which is most similar to the classic fairy tale: she is the protagonist and the wolf follows and tries to eat her. In her story she is bringing a basket of goodies to her grandmother, when she receives an anonymous threat from the ‘Goody Bandit’, who has been stealing all of the recipes in the forest. The wolf’s version of the story explains that he is an investigative journalist, only questioning Red and her whereabouts to get leads on the mystery of the ‘Goody Bandit’, whom he believes to be Red and her granny. The wolf arrives at Granny Pucket’s cottage hoping to talk to Red again, but finds it empty. He only disguises himself as Granny Pucket so that Red might reveal something about the Goody Bandit. Next, the “woodsman” reveals that he is an innocent aspiring actor, thrown through the window of the cottage only after accidentally cutting down a giant tree to prepare for a role as a woodsman. Lastly, we get the story from Granny Pucket’s perspective. Contrary to the classic tale, we learn that granny is actually a badass who competes in and masters many extreme sports, a fact she had previously hid from Red.
After each of the stories is told, we learn that one other character, a bunny named Boingo, is interwoven in every story. Seemingly insignificant at first, he is found to be actually quite important to the story. Upon further investigation, it is found out that Boingo was the “Goody Bandit” all along, the real antagonist of the film.
Hoodwinked plays with common fairy tale tropes throughout the entire film. Some they flip, in order to ‘hoodwink’ the audience, but others they maintain in order to maintain the illusion of the setting in a fairy tale world.
For starters, instead of the wolf being the villain, the real villain is a fuzzy little bunny. The wolf is a classic antagonist in many fairy tales, with big paws, sharp teeth, and being a natural predator, so we, as well as many of the characters in the movie, instantly assume that he is the villain. The police try to detain the wolf immediately, but he is saved by a detective who arrives and requests everyone’s stories. The bunny lays low and appears in everyone of the main characters’ stories in small ways, until they piece it together in the end that he is the real villain. Nobody is suspicious of him throughout the movie up until the very end, when it is clear that he is the Goody Bandit, when he then exclaims, “You’ve been hoodwinked, baby!”
Another common trope in fairy tales that is reversed in this movie is the helplessness of female characters. In Little Red Riding Hood, the girl is naive and her grandmother and herself are preyed on by the wolf. In both the Brother Grimms’ and Perrault’s versions, the girl and her grandmother do not fight back, and they are only saved by the hunter in the end in some versions. In Hoodwinked, however, Red is a black belt in martial arts, and she actually beats up the wolf in one scene before she runs away from him. Red craves adventure and actually resents her grandmother for keeping her risky life in extreme sports away from her. Red and her grandmother actually save the forest from Boingo, the Goody Bandit, by using their physical and mental strength, qualities not commonly seen in women in fairy tales.
Although the Hoodwinked plot is based on its reversal of common fairy tale tropes, there are still talking creatures, normalized magic, and descriptive names for characters. In fact, they make fun of a lot of these tropes with small quips and jokes throughout the film. In one scene the detective, Flippers, who is a frog, asks Red why they call her Red, to which she replies, “why do they call you Flippers?”. This is a joke on the common trope of referencing characters by their descriptive features like Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and the Little Mermaid.
The jokes and call backs to classic fairy tales that we all know is what makes the movie so funny and iconic. What makes the movie so brilliant is how it plays with common tropes and thrives on the fact that we all grew up reading these classic tales, almost like we are all in on some large inside joke. This is why directors and writers continue to adapt and retell the classic tales we all love.
