Hoodwinked

When pitching this peculiar animated adventure to the Weinstein Co., did the Edwards brothers (Cory and Todd) sell it as Little Red Riding Hood meets Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon? Believe it or not, that’s sort of what the writer-director team has made, and it actually seems less derivative than other recent cartoon movies. There’s been some criminal mischief afoot in the forest, and how it went down is a matter of interpretation. Red (Anne Hathaway, bratty), Granny (Glenn Close, frisky), the Woodsman (James Belushi, humdrum) and the Wolf (Patrick Warburton, hilarious) all tell their versions of the story. The synthesis has room for extreme sports; the requisite musical numbers; and wacky mystery-solving, evil-defeating mayhem. True, it also can seem like a plotty hodgepodge, whose irritants sometimes cancel its pleasures. But Hoodwinked is what many animated movies aspire to be: enjoyably deconstructionist. The kids in my audience seemed surprised and delighted by how it engaged their minds.