After 20 years,Hoodwinked!remains one of the strangest experiments in animation ever made, but it’s still hilarious after two decades. The 2000s were a golden age for animation. Some of thebest animated movies of the 2000sare also some of the best animated movies of all time, likeShrek,Spirited Away, andThe Incredibles. For the most part, however, animation didn’t get extremely weird, and was mostly used for high-quality but straightforward children’s movies. There is one big exception from 2005, however, and it remains one of the strangest animated movies ever made to this day.
With the highs of animation in the 2000s, there also came many more lows. There are plenty offorgotten animated movies from the early 2000s, and many more that were forgotten for good reason. One, however, was too far ahead of its time to be forgotten so quickly, and it’s actually better now than it was two decades ago. That movie isHoodwinked!, and despite how utterly strange it was, it was also uproariously hilarious with a sense of humor that works much better in 2025.
Hoodwinked! Is A Wild Ride And One Of The Most Fascinating Animated Comedies
Hoodwinked! Mixes Shrek’s Parody Of Fairy Tales With Pulp Fiction’s Non-Linear Storytelling For An Intriguing Final Product
Everything about the premise ofHoodwinked!makes it sound like the animated movie shouldn’t have worked.Hoodwinked!is a reimagining of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, but instead of being a simple tale about a wolf trying to eat a little girl, all the characters in the fairy tale work together to uncover a massive recipe-stealing conspiracy led by a bunny named Boingo (Andy Dick). It also changed Wolf into an investigative journalist, the Woodsman into an aspiring actor and schnitzel seller, Granny into an extreme sports enthusiast, and Red into a martial arts prodigy.
Hoodwinked! sounds like a mindless mishmash of completely unconnected ideas and jokes, but it somehow ended up coming together to make a fascinating animated film.
Hoodwinked!parodied several mystery films and shows, but it also drew upon the non-linear storytelling of movies likePulp FictionandRashomon.Each of the characters ofHoodwinked!- who were voiced by massive stars like Anne Hathaway, Glenn Close, and Patrick Warburton - has their own version of events that contradict one another, and the actual story of the movie isn’t clear until its final moments.Hoodwinked!sounds like a mindless mishmash of completely unconnected ideas and jokes, but it somehow ended up coming together to make a fascinating animated film. There’s truly nothing else that combines so many disparate parts in such a strangely engaging way.
Hoodwinked!’s Animation Is Rough (But The Movie Is Hilarious)
Oddly fascinating though it was,Hoodwinked!was the recipient of quite a bit of criticism. It has just 46% onRotten Tomatoes, and almost all the critics could agree on one thing:Hoodwinked!’s animation was terrible.Even by the standards of 2005, when 3D animation was in its infancy,Hoodwinked!looked awful compared to its contemporaries, likeMadagascar,Robots, andChicken Little. There’s a litany of reasonsHoodwinked!looked so bad - the animation team was inexperienced, the creators tried to emulate claymation but ended up making each character look somewhat uncanny, and the entire production ran over budget.
Hoodwinked!is available onYouTube.
The rough animation ofHoodwinked!hasn’t, however, taken away any of the edge of its humor. There are almost too many hilarious moments inHoodwinkedto list them all. There’sHoodwinked!’s parody ofCops, Wolf and Twitchy’s strange partner dynamic, little moments of extraordinarily bizarre and absurd humor, and much more.Japeth the Goat (Benjy Gaither) and his penchant for singing everything he says even became a meme in 2023(viaKnow Your Meme).Hoodwinked!is uproariously funny for every second of its 80-minute runtime, and the animation is truly one of the only bad things about the movie.
Hoodwinked Has Aged Weirdly Well 20 Years Later
Perhaps the strangest part ofHoodwinked!is how well the film has aged over the past two decades.Hoodwinked!was perhaps a decade behind in terms of animation, but it was well ahead of its time in its sense of humor.The absurdist and slapstick comedy thatHoodwinked!was built on didn’t appeal to critics in 2005, but it works incredibly well in 2025. Some of the film’s jokes, such as Wolf very seriously telling Twitch “God as my witness, you will learn to speak,” would fit in perfectly with the deadpan ridiculousness ofThe Other GuysorNapoleon Dynamite.
15 Best Animated Movies Of All Time, Ranked
Animation is a remarkably diverse art form, so the best animated movies of all time encompass comedies, sci-fi, fantasy and many more genres.
Hoodwinked!has defied all expectations and aged like fine wine. What should have been a direct-to-video, schlocky movie found in a department store’s bargain bin turned out to be a true diamond in the rough, and it gets better with each passing year.Hoodwinked!is truly an anomaly, both for its strange blend of low-grade animation with top-tier humor and for its remarkable staying power. There has never been anything quite likeHoodwinked!before, and there probably won’t be ever again.
